Dreaming Across Class Lines

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Most importantly, work-life balance is good for people, who shouldn’t have to choose between buying their kids groceries and caring for them when they’re sick. A family-friendly workplace can make the difference between keeping a job and being forced to give it up. It can also determine whether an employee can take on the new responsibilities that come with a promotion.

In other words, work-life balance affects not only security but also upward mobility, which is at the heart of the American Dream. In recent years, the very rich have quickly been getting even richer. People at other income levels aren’t sharing in this growth. As Jared Bernstein explains in Crunch (see below), this rising inequality is largely to blame for the fact that, even before the economy’s recent turn for the worse, many Americans have been feeling financially squeezed.

When wealth is concentrated more and more in the hands of a few, everybody else suffers. Low-income workers with limited skills and safety nets face especially long odds and high stakes. Writing on his blog (Feb. 4, 2008), former U.S. secretary of labor Robert Reich notes that improving wages and mobility requires more progressive taxes, stronger unions, better schools, and broader access to higher education. Work-life balance is just one piece of a complicated project, but it’s a crucial one—because it’s virtually impossible to keep a job, much less get promoted, when even being there prevents you from being a responsible parent.

Despite the benefits to everyone involved, it can be tough to convince managers to initiate family-friendly policy changes—so laws that set standards are important, too. Last year saw the introduction of federal legislation on both paid sick days and flexible work. Several state and local initiatives are already in place.

Hard work is supposed to create success, in turn freeing us from the constant need to assign work a higher priority than everything else. But the relatively well-off in fact owe much of their good fortune to privilege and luck. Even allowing that the myth of the self-made American has some truth to it, our changing economy makes it more of a long shot than ever.

Hard work won’t help people move up in the world if it keeps them from meeting their responsibilities at home. When we frame work-life balance as a reward for those who achieve a certain status, we get this cause and effect exactly backward.

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