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Working Parents Deserve First Dibs on Shifts

It finally happened. A court of law has ruled that caring for your children is more important than prime time TV. Earlier this week a Canadian federal court upheld a human rights tribunal’s finding that employers have an obligation to try to accommodate employee needs as they pertain to childcare.  That means if your boss can reasonably let you work the day shift so you can drop your kid at daycare, then she has to.

(UPDATE: From the Globe and Mail article linked to above, “The ruling also leaves the onus on employees to prove that they have made reasonable efforts to sort out their family obligations before requesting help from their employers, Rudner said.” This isn’t about every parent trumping every non-parent. It is designed to protect those who would otherwise be forced to leave their job.)

Before I go any further, let me fully disclose my biases. Not only am I a parent, I am also a night owl. I worked shift work in the Telus Mobility call centre for a brief stint before I had kids and I could not for the life of me understand why young, childless people made such a fuss about working until 9pm. You know that means you don’t have to be in until noon, right? And you get to skip rush hour altogether? And you can still meet friends for a drink or whatever? I just didn’t get it. I still don’t.

But I don’t have to get it to understand why it might seem unfair for one employee who does the exact same job as another to get first dibs on shifts just because she has a kid. I mean, imagine if I had to start coming in at 8am! INJUSTICE! It seems unfair, but that doesn’t mean it’s not right.

It’s common decency, for one thing. I once worked lunches as a server with a woman who had to pick her daughter up from school at 3:30. This meant that I always had to put in the grunt hours between 3:00 and 5:00 when you clean and prep and make next to no tips and she never did. Not once did it ever even occur to me (or to anyone else) to complain. She had to leave at 3:00 just like I could only work two shifts a week because I was in school and the owner had to yell at everyone because he was an asshole. It’s life. You deal with it.

Having children may be a choice, but taking care of them is not. Juggling work and childcare is hard enough for working parents on a typical schedule. (Sick days and PA days and doctor’s appointments and school breaks all have to be covered somehow.) But how would a single parent even go about finding child care to cover shift work? Daycares have set hours and round-the-clock nanny care is absurdly expensive. A parent’s need to work around child care limitations does trump someone else’s desire for a 9 to 5 lifestyle.

Okay, I lied. It’s not a choice. I mean, even if I employ my power of hypothetical thought to its utmost and imagine that I could have opted to ignore my own biological imperative to procreate — even if I, personally, could have chosen otherwise — somebody has to have the children. Reproduction is necessary for our political, economic and cultural continuation. Who is going to write all the TV shows when you get old if people stop having children?! God, think about it. (Oh yeah, there’s that social security problem too. That would have been smart to bring up.)

One more thing. What is the primary factor holding women back from equal footing in the workforce? Motherhood, that’s what. This is not to say there aren’t other factors (like blatant sexism in the tech industry, for example), but this is the biggest. Women take more time off from their career when their children are young, they work shorter hours and they choose less demanding career paths so they can be there for their families. For some women this is a choice they want to make. For many others, this is a choice they have to make.

So bravo, Canadian federal court! Bravo Justice Mandamin! This is a huge step forward for Canadian families and an even bigger one for women everywhere.

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5 Reasons Parents Can’t Clock an Entire Work Week to Save Their Lives

  1. A kid is sick. If there is vomiting or a fever of some form of skin rash, you will generally concede that your kid is sick and needs to stay home. You may need to keep multiple children home because carting two kids back and forth to school or the sitter with a puke-y sib in tow isn’t fair to anyone. Alternatively, one of the babysitter’s kids could get sick.
  2. A kid could think he’s sick and then be totally fine. Like, a six-year-old boy could wake up in the morning clutching at his stomach and then proceed to eat one and a half bagels but still insist on feeling sick. You may be highly suspicious of this stomach malady but if he’s never tried to get out of school before you’ll  still believe him. By 10am even he will admits he’s perfectly fine, never felt better,  for example.
  3. A kid could claim to be sick, actually vomit all over the kitchen floor when you refuse to believe it and then STILL turn out to be totally fine. Because maybe what she was complaining about was a sore throat, by which she actually meant she had some phlegm caught in her throat, but she couldn’t actually say that because she’s only four. That phlegm, coupled with the most sensitive gag reflex in the history of the world, could cause her to actually vomit a small amount of real vomit on her way to the breakfast table. Instant win, she’ll get to stay home (as do all the others because you don’t want hurling at the side of the road), and will be totally fine, running and dancing and begging for food by 10am. Hypothetically.
  4. A kid could be perfectly healthy and still have to miss school for a doctor’s appointment. Between regular checkups, dentists appointments, emergency room visits for head injuries, and having to return to the hospital for cast removal, stitches or x-ray results it’s a wonder kids ever get to school. Or perhaps your doctor insists on seeing your perfectly healthy toddler every three months for no reason other than she’s skinny just like her brother of sister.
  5. All the kids are healthy, but you are sick. Every once in a while some little bastard of a virus will wipe you right out no matter how convincingly you tell yourself to, “Suck it up, Rebecca. You can’t get sick.” If you actually manage to get sick enough that someone else has to take care of the kids, though, it’s almost as good as a vacation.

Of course, if you have three kids like me, you can actually multiple this list times three and that makes 15 reasons why you are a professional disappointment. So cut yourself some slack.