In today’s busy world, many employees wear two hats, one as a dedicated professional at work and another as a caregiver performing unpaid care work at home. Working caregivers shoulder the greater responsibility of balancing professional duties with caring for loved ones with severe disabilities, age related needs, or health conditions.
Yet, in the workplace, they are often invisible, unrecognised, and unsupported. Among the affected groups of employees who are providing caregiving support while pursuing demanding careers are those who are caregivers of persons with severe disabilities (PWSD).
Caregiving responsibilities for PWSD are associated with a range of challenges, including long-term care that presents physical, emotional and mental health tolls on carers, who often experience stress, fatigue, anxiety, depression, sleep loss, a lack of time and a lack of control over their own time, among others.
With these challenges in place, their ability to sustain paid employment is threatened. Consequently, carers of PWSD in employment are often forced to reduce their working hours, take less demanding jobs or leave the labour market altogether.
A World Bank survey of 114 mothers of children with disabilities in Kenya and Uganda demonstrated that caregiving demands are intense, stating that 15 percent of mothers reported spending their entire day caregiving.
Additionally, these mothers were 1.9 times more likely to lose their jobs and 2.1 times more likely to quit than mothers of children without disabilities, due to inflexible work schedules, medical emergencies, and other responsibilities. These findings clearly demonstrate that employers can do much to support employees who juggle work and caregiving responsibilities for PWSD.
One of the measures employers can adopt to support working carers of PWSD is caregiver-friendly workplace policies, as an intentional employer initiative to reduce conflict between work and unpaid caring responsibilities and support carers' lives outside of work.
To date, most workplaces continue to operate under deeply ingrained norms, including a full time, forty hour plus workweek, rigid reporting and leaving times, very limited access to paid time off or leaves of absence, and work responsibilities that employers insist can only be completed in the traditional way they are always completed. Because of these entrenched norms, many workers with caregiving responsibilities for PWSD struggle to or cannot meet their employers’ expectations.
Once adopted, it is anticipated that the caregiver friendly workplace policies will address these deeply rooted norms by introducing flexible work arrangements such as flexible work schedules, reduced working hours, part time work, job sharing, and working from home, among others. Furthermore, these policies are expected to incorporate unpaid leave provisions beyond the mandatory employer's time frame and provide support services such as counselling, support groups, workshops and seminars on caregiving issues.
This initiative will not only safeguard the employment opportunities for working carers of PWSD from being disrupted by their caregiving responsibilities but also attract and retain young carers in organisations and harness their transferable skills for meaningful careers.
To greatly benefit from such initiatives, working carers of PWSD must embrace disclosure.
This is crucial as it serves as the initial step for conversations between the working carers, employers and colleagues in the workplace about unpaid responsibilities held outside of employment. Most importantly, it activates workplace support.
These practices provide organisations with opportunities that make caregiving a “talkable” subject and supply employers and employees with a common basis for discussing caregiving responsibilities, as well as providing working carers with any additional support that they may require.
In addition, failure to support working caregivers in the workplace also has a detrimental effect on employers, including increased absenteeism, unplanned absences, increased employee turnover, decreased employee retention, and productivity loss. This clearly demonstrates that employers also stand to benefit significantly by adopting carer friendly workplace policies as part of their employment practices.
By implementing such policies, employers can use them as a foundation for integrating paid employment with unpaid caregiving to mitigate the above negative consequences. Employers must recognise that unpaid caregiving is no longer a personal and private matter in family
life, but has become a significant social and economic policy issue across the globe that requires their attention too.
Godana is a disability and social protection specialist. [email protected]
