A single father, he tried to adjust by volunteering for overtime assignments on weekends when his former wife could look after their children. Weekday overtime was difficult because he had to pick his kids up from school by 6 p.m.

But Bell Atlantic managers refused to compromise. "At the beginning, a lot of the supervisors were willing to work with me," he recalls. "But then they came up with the mandatory overtime policy, and that's when things went haywire." Finally, Bryant had no choice but to leave work in time to pick up the children—and the company fired him. Through his union, Communications Workers Local 2101, Bryant got his job back after a successful arbitration.

Yet the conflict Bryant experienced in trying to be a good worker and responsible parent was becoming more common among telecommunications workers across the country. So when it came time to bargain new contracts with several companies in 1998, CWA members mobilized with rallies and a massive member education campaign, calling attention to the havoc abusive mandatory overtime policies created in balancing work and family life. At US West, members even went on strike, garnering widespread public support.

As a result, CWA negotiated contracts that limit mandatory overtime. And CWA is among an increasing number of unions bargaining for such benefits as flexible work schedules, child care and other family-friendly benefits as workers struggle to balance workplace and family responsibilities. Complementing the bargaining strategy are state legislative initiatives to give legal backing to such policies as equal pay for women and paid family leave. "Often, people look at balancing work and family as a personal problem," says Debby King, executive director of the 1199/Employment Training and Job Security Program in New York. "There needs to be more discussion about the institutional support people need." Campaigns centered on work-family issues, she notes, "are a major way of involving members and building a stronger movement."

"The fight for fair pay is crucial," says AFSCME President Gerald McEntee. "But it's more than a living wage. Workers also need the time off and the benefits to take care of their loved ones—their children, their spouses and partners, their parents. That's why we're fighting for paid leave, negotiating for child care centers and pushing for higher-quality, more affordable child care."

Never have so many unions been working in so many ways and places to make workplaces more family-friendly. Current federal laws—passed in large part through the efforts of the union movement—protect women from pay discrimination based on gender and guarantee many workers three months' unpaid leave for the birth or adoption of a child or in case of a serious illness. In contract negotiations and legislative efforts, union activists and their allies build on those laws.

Working parents such as UAW Local 1700 member Tammy Skelly, with sons Trevor and Michael, look forward to a UAW initiative to provide child care for Detroit-area families.

Family and Medical Leave

The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) grants workers unpaid time off when they give birth, adopt a child or need to take care of an ill family member or recover from their own illness. But the law only applies to companies that employ 50 or more people—leaving out nearly half of the workforce. In Maine, union members began meeting with allies from religious congregations and advocates for women and low-income workers in the mid-1990s. The coalition built support in the legislature with letters and phone calls to state lawmakers, getting the word out to union members through mail, presentations at union meetings and phone trees. Their efforts paid off when the Maine legislature passed a law, effective in May 1999, extending the benefits of FMLA to workers at companies with 15 or more employees. "Sometimes those groups can persuade legislators we can't, and vice versa," says Ned McCann, legislative director for the Maine AFL-CIO. "We saw this not just as a union issue."

Paid family leave

To enable more workers to take family leave, unions, in coalition with the National Partnership for Women and Families, are campaigning for paid family leave, focusing their efforts on state legislatures. In Massachusetts, activists are looking at ways to tap into a surplus in the state's unemployment insurance fund and extend those benefits to employees taking family and medical leave. Another bill would create a family and employment security trust fund.

"There are few, if any, families who can afford to take off 12 weeks without pay," says Kathleen Casavant, secretary-treasurer of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. "We'd like to provide them some financial support so they can be with their families when they need to be." A 1996 evaluation of FMLA by the Family Leave Commission found that the nearly two-thirds of employees who didn't take the family or medical leave they needed cited lost wages as the reason. In November, President Clinton proposed allowing states to experiment with using their own unemployment insurance systems to implement paid parental leave.

In California, Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill in October, at the urging of the California Federation of Labor, that mandates a study of extending disability insurance to workers taking family leave and increases leave benefits.

UAW President Stephen Yokich and the Big Three automakers announce a $6 million joint child care project, which Yokich credits "to the collective bargaining process."

Equal pay

Like unpaid family leave, equal pay for women also is protected by federal law. And yet, the average family still loses more than $4,000 a year because of unequal pay, according to a recent study by the AFL-CIO and the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Union members are working at the state level to pass equal pay laws, and succeeded in introducing 29 state equal pay bills last year similar to an Indiana bill to outlaw pay discrimination based on several factors, including gender, which passed the state House last spring despite a full-throttle campaign by Big Business.

And in Illinois, the state House passed a similar equal pay bill with one abstention on the same day the state federation held its first-ever Working Women's Day of Action. To build support for the bill in the state Senate, the state federation sent union members a survey soliciting input on its legislative agenda—and has received more than 8,000 responses. Union members expressing an interest in equal pay will form the core of a grassroots activist network.

"Equal pay is not just a working women's issue, it's a family issue," says Catherine Shannon, political director of the Illinois state federation. "If we effectively ended pay discrimination against women, family incomes would rise."

Child care

Child care is another key issue for working families. In Washington, SEIU District 925 and other unions in the Seattle Union Now coalition sought to address child care workers' inadequate wages—low pay that often leads to high turnover and diminished quality of care. Working with the community—including parents with children in child care centers—SUN launched a postcard and call-in campaign aimed at state lawmakers. Its efforts yielded a pay boost for child care workers, and the governor allocated $4 million for a two-year project creating a wage ladder based on experience, education and responsibility.

	Union members participate in the Illinois Working Women's Day of Action rally at the state capitol as part of a successful effort to win passage of an equal pay bill in the state house.

In New York, a coalition of unions and the state AFL-CIO successfully lobbied state leaders for more child care subsidies and won the largest single-year increase in the state's history in 1999. The $177 million will result in child care for 13,000 more children and construction of child care centers. Union leaders started laying the groundwork for the victory several years ago, when members of a union coalition began working with local child care programs to make them more worker-friendly—such as ending summer camp at 6 p.m., instead of 4 p.m. "We're trying to work on having society recognize that we want to be excellent workers and excellent family members as well," District 1199's King says. "If public officials know that unions think this is an important issue, they pay attention."

UAW Local 1413 member Leslie Bozeman takes her 4H-year-old daughter, Anna, to the UAW-DaimlerChrysler Child Development Center in Huntsville, Ala. "It is so close and accessible I can go check on her any time," says Bozeman, who helps assemble electronic boards. "The center teaches the children foreign languages, gymnastics and computers. I feel it is preparing her for kindergarten and beyond." Asked what she would do for child care if the center was not available, Bozeman thinks for a moment and says, "I have no idea. It is such a struggle finding a place to leave your child that you are comfortable with. I feel as comfortable leaving her there as I would with a family member."

Bargaining for working families

More unions are making work and family issues a high priority during negotiations. Surveys of bargaining unit members prior to negotiations now frequently include questions about child care, paid family leave and related issues. "It is important to look at who your members are and what they want," says Netsy Firestein, executive director of the Labor Project for Working Families, a Berkeley, Calif.-based group that maintains a database of family-friendly contract provisions. Firestein advises union leaders to "keep in mind the range of possibilities," from child care referral services to on-site child care centers.

Members of HERE Local 2 sign up for child and elder care benefits.

In April 1999, the UAW and the Big Three automakers created the Alliance for Children and Working Families, which will fund family service projects in Detroit over the next four years, including training for child care providers, summer camp, after-school programs, emergency in-home day care and back-up child care. "We've brought the issue of child care to the table a number of times," says UAW President Stephen Yokich. "This is how the process is supposed to work. We identify our problems and concerns, the company identifies their issues and together we work to find solutions. The real credit here goes to the collective bargaining process." The funding is only the latest in family-friendly benefits the UAW has negotiated over the years, including model child care centers in conjunction with each of the Big Three automakers.

A group of AFSCME District 31 members negotiated a contract that allows new parents to work at home one day a week until their babies turn 1 year old. Barbara Nicosia, president of the union representing circuit court clerks in Cook County, Illinois, says her union doesn't wait until the contract is about to expire to bargain for family benefits. "We work on these things in between. They are major issues in our local." The strategy also helps build the union in the long term, Nicosia says, because with "a more productive unit, you have a stronger hand when you bargain for wages."

	Leslie Bozeman's daughter, Anna, is enrolled in the child care center run by UAW and DaimlerChrysler in Alabama.

Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Local 2 in San Francisco negotiated a child and elder care fund and a flexible paid-time-off policy in 1994. "They were ‘family-friendly' issues, but also respect issues," says Lisa Jaicks, plan coordinator. Before bargaining, union leaders spearheaded meetings to enable workers with similar duties to meet and discuss issues of common concern—housekeepers met with housekeepers, for instance. "It became obvious that people were worried about their children and their parents, and we knew that the employers were concerned about absenteeism and distractions at work," Jaicks recalls. She led the labor-management committee that designed the fund, which now has grown to $2.5 million. The hotels began by contributing 5 cents per scheduled hour per employee, a figure that is now 15 cents and will climb to 20 cents in five years. Members apply for the funds, which can be as much as $225 per month for child care. A unique aspect of the bargaining was that members of the labor-management committee had to grapple with their own efforts at balancing work and family. So union members and managers, usually on opposite sides of conflicts, found common ground as they shared stories of caring for young children or aged parents.

The program offers key support to such workers as Eva Brandon, a busperson at the Grand Hyatt. Two years ago, Brandon struggled to patch together child care for her son, Christopher, often scrambling for babysitters. "I used to take him here and there," she says. Now, he attends the child care center at his school, because the union reimburses her for the $135 monthly fee. "My son is very happy there. I am so happy about it," Brandon says.

Like Brandon, CWA member Bryant now is able to balance work and family as a result of his union's efforts. He says his struggle against mandatory overtime convinced him that the union movement's effort on work-family issues "are not about being male or about being female."

"It's about being a parent."