Recently, the EEOC issued a “best practices” document for employers on work-family balance. This “technical assistance” document is designed not only to promote compliance with antidiscrimination laws that relate to or affect employees with caregiving responsibilities but also to encourage employers to adopt policies that go beyond legal minimum requirements.

This document is not binding on employers, yet it is notable for reflecting both the increasing challenges faced by employees with caregiving responsibilities, and the low likelihood of successfully addressing such problems through mere compliance with existing law. As acting EEOC chairman Stuart J. Ishimaru stated in a press release accompanying the document, “Today we take another step forward, articulating not just the bare minimum required to avoid unlawful discrimination, but also thinking broadly about the ways in which family-friendly workplace policies can improve workers’ ability to balance caregiving responsibilities with work.”

CHALLENGES FOR EMPLOYEES WITH CAREGIVING RESPONSIBILITIES

The notion of “caregivers” comprising a special class of employees is of relatively recent origin. What separates these employees descriptively from others is that they, in addition to doing paid work, are also engaged in significant caregiving outside of the workplace. Obviously, the biggest subcategory of caregivers is parents, but caregivers also include those engaged in the care of aging parents or relatives with disabilities. These caregiving responsibilities pose a variety of challenges that fall under the general “work-life balance” heading.

These caregiving responsibilities are not distributed evenly across the working population. As the EEOC's best practices document notes, the care of children and other dependents is disproportionately provided by women, and even more disproportionately by women of color. Men's role in parenting and other caregiving has increased, but is still vastly outweighed by women's. At the same time, women's workforce participation has dramatically increased, so that women account today for 46 percent of the workforce, and women's earnings are increasingly important. These trends may be further exacerbated by the recessionary economy, in which the vast majority of layoffs have fallen on men (who tend to work in hard-hit industries such as construction and investment banking), and, thus, women's job security and earnings are even more important to family support. There is thus a significant overlap between women's rights and caregivers’ rights.