On September 8, 2016, Deloitte LLP announced it would grant 16 weeks of paid leave to employees who provide family caregiving not only to new children, but to older children, parents, and spouses.  This is an enormous improvement in the U.S. which has very little national support for paid caregiver leave from paid work outside the home.  Many caregiver and maternity leave policies in the US guarantee only that you may have unpaid leave without losing your job, and usually for not more than 8 or 12 weeks, while many other developed nations require much more generous policies administered by the state.  The business magazine, Fortune, declared Deloitte’s benefit announcement “the latest in the paid leave arms race.” In America, this is good news.  Would that such an arms race could suffice.

In her influential book Justice, Gender, and the Family, Susan Moller Okin wrote about how the structure of the heterosexual family, which assumes that women will do the majority of the caregiving, is a factor taken into account by businesses when hiring men over women and when assuming that employees are men and have a spouse at home to do caregiving, thus making long work hours and unscheduled meetings and overtime demands employers can expect will be met. Okin argued that businesses are thus “free riders” on the work of caregivers,  caregivers who are largely women, whose unpaid and uncompensated work makes more paid work hours available for their spouses.  Women still work a “second shift” when they come home from paid work.

Without a change in the business world and at home over who does the caregiving and whether employees are supported in their lives outside of work, those who do caregiving will continue to be exploited by our economic system.  Perhaps that change is coming. The Deloitte move is certainly the right thing to do relative to little or no paid leave, or paid leave only for new children.

But if it continues to come company by company, it will affect only small chunks of workers and be used in part as a recruiting tool to bring particular types of professionals to particular types of corporations.  These benefits will remain off-limits to even salaried workers in different sectors of the economy, and especially to lower-income workers who are seen by their employers as interchangeable with those currently looking for work. According to the US Bureau of Labor & Statistics and other reliable sources, women still tend to work lower-paid jobs than men in the US, with women of color earning even less than white women, overall. Men in lower-paid jobs will not have the flexibility to temporarily leave work to care for their families, and neither will very many women, and especially marginalized men and women.   Only a widespread cultural movement or governmental mandate regarding paid leave and other supports for caregivers will ensure that just caring for caregivers is itself justly distributed and available to all.

For more of my thoughts on the North American context for caregiving see:

• my peer-reviewed scholarly article, “Just Caring for Caregivers: What Society and the State Owe to Those Who Render Care” in the open access journal Feminist Philosophy Quarterly
• my scholarly blog entry, “A Zero-Sum Game? A Consideration of Dependency Workers and Dependent Elderly Persons,” at the Canadian blog Impact Ethics, and an earlier U.S.-specific version published here

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