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- Childfree workers told Business Insider they often feel pressured to cover for parents at work.
- But they don't blame parents, who they say are also stretched thin.
- A forever labor shortage and remote roles might only make things worse without better policy.
Kira Benson used to feel the pressure to pick up extra shifts at a former barista job when coworkers needed the time off for parenting duties.
With a shortage of workers at the shop, Benson said their coworkers often expected childfree staff members to be more flexible and work more hours when needed. They said on multiple occasions, coworkers' kids would get dropped off and hang out at the shop while their parents worked.
"The reason childfree people are upset about getting dumped on with this responsibility is largely the company's fault, because they have not provided enough staff to adequately do the amount of work," Benson, a 25-year-old based in Seattle, said. "So everyone is constantly running on the ragged edge, so when you're asked to do a favor, you don't want to do the favor — because you're already tired."
Benson's not alone in experiencing the tension of splitting work between childfree workers and those with kids. The great childfree-versus-parents battle isn't really between those two groups, experts say, but instead comes from a new post-pandemic labor shortage norm at many companies. In a race for increasing profits, firms are trying to keep labor costs low, cutting back on the kind of benefits that make balancing work with parenthood tenable. It's also an issue of public policy. As childcare costs rise, and parents aren't guaranteed paid leave, they have to contort themselves between work and home — and their childfree coworkers are sometimes forced to pick up the slack.
It's a thorny topic, and one where workers on both sides of the equation end up feeling squeezed. For childfree workers, it may lead to resentment, or feeling like their time isn't as valuable. For workers with children, it may mean guilt or embarrassment. They might also face discipline for missing work, or be forced to log back on to work hours after school pick up to catch up.
"I haven't heard of many options where parents are being accommodated or given more resources in order to successfully parent and be a quote unquote good employee," Amanda Pericles, a 31-year-old speech language pathologist and mother of one, said.
It's a problem that stands to only get worse, as childcare funding dries up and more parents are left scrambling to find care, or to drop out of the workforce completely. At the same time, return to office mandates might threaten the delicate balance some parents have struck to carve out some flexibility. And that might, in turn, lead to childfree workers being asked to take on more.
But the childfree workers, parents, and experts that Business Insider spoke with say that making it a worker-to-worker dispute takes the onus off of companies and policy. Instead, they say, it's a systemic failure. And it may be part of a system that firms use to hold leverage and power in the labor market.
"What I can say is capitalism has won this round," JessieMay Reed, a single mother of two who works in education, told Insider. "It has put two groups against each other to cover up their dirty deeds."
'Greedy jobs' pressure childfree workers and parents to duke it out over work responsibilities
Benson, who now works in social-media management, said that as a disabled person, they've felt deprioritized in the workplace compared to parents, who are granted flexibility for things like picking up their kids. Benson said that time off to manage their chronic illness wasn't as prioritized. Indeed, while disability discrimination is illegal in the US, it seems to remain rampant: Bloomberg Law reported that 66% of the cases the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received during the pandemic were disability related.
"We need more support for parents and we need more support for disabled people, but it is highly frustrating when it feels like parents are put on a higher pedestal of getting the right to that time off," Benson said. "And as a disabled person, I'm seen like a burden or an inconvenience."
Benson doesn't begrudge parents, but notes that time off for parenting is more of a social norm than other needs. Still, they said they understand parents are stretched, too. The current system of rampant understaffing, little time off, and unaffordable childcare isn't designed for families where two parents have to work long hours to keep up with an increased cost of living.
That's due in part to what Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst calls "greedy jobs, " a term conceptualized by Nobel prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin.
"Greedy jobs are ones which demand more hours, and are less flexible, because they count on being able to demand workers to abide by those work requirements," Dube wrote in an email to Business Insider. That might particularly fall on parents of younger children, and spillover onto their childfree workers who have to be yanked in to cover that work.
"If the work process is designed to be less 'greedy' it more easily accommodates passing on tasks across workers, and it's a lot less high stakes an event when someone has to take time off to take care of a family member," Dube said.
Some examples of ways firms exercise power are through making workers sign strict noncompetes so they can't easily move to a different company, or making full-time roles into contract roles to avoid paying certain benefits.
Evi Nardi, a 35-year-old content creator who focuses on normalizing being childfree, said that her DMs overflow with messages from hundreds of people — especially those in the service industry — recounting times that they've been told to take Christmas or New Year's shifts, because they don't have children to spend those holidays with.
Indeed, erratic shift scheduling has led some service workers to forsake the industry altogether. Some states are moving towards — or have already enacted — legislation that would ensure workers have more predictable scheduling. Anecdotally, some workers have said they've been asked to take on holiday work so parents can have time off, or feel they have to work around them.
Chalk some of that up to the mechanisms that firms use to retain power in the labor market, and keep wages lower than they would be in a perfectly competitive world. It's called "monopsony power," and the Treasury Department found in a 2022 report that wages were 15% to 20% less than they would be in a perfectly competitive market because of it.
Nardi said that she "can't even imagine how difficult it is" to balance work with a child, since "sometimes even just handling work alone and taking care of yourself is a lot." But while things come up for everyone, she said that she thinks parents sometimes get more consideration and flexibility for child-related issues, rather than when a childfree worker needs a personal day.
On the other side, though, is parents dealing with a country that does not have federal paid leave or guaranteed sick leave. For Pericles, that means that she doesn't necessarily get to use PTO for vacation, or a break: Instead, she's using it to coordinate childcare and deal with issues as they arise.
"It's been kind of difficult navigating, especially as things get more expensive and cost of living and cost of daycare, it just gets more expensive as the years go on," Pericles, the millennial mother and speech pathologist, said.
Pericles isn't alone: Slate reported that, anecdotally, many working parents said they were burning through PTO on childcare issues. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that workers in private industry have, on average, about seven sick days per year, even after working somewhere for 10 years. And while 79% of workers in private industry have access to paid vacation, which ranged from 11 days after one year of service to 20 days after two decades, just 43% of those in service industries — leisure and hospitality — received PTO, as many of those hourly roles don't come with benefits and aren't full time.
For Reed, the mother of two, a career in retail was rendered untenable. She would often be late to her shift because of childcare constraints, a no-go in hourly work. She said that in order to be the "best worker," all she needs is a tenable starting time, and accessible, affordable childcare. Today, she's working in education. It's not that much money, but it means she's able to pick up her kids and be off on days where their childcare facilities are closed.
Why companies don't just hire more people to cover shifts
One question that came up amongst both parents and childfree workers is why — instead of foisting more work onto others or making workers scramble to find coverage — firms can't just hire more people instead.
"Understaffing is one of the ways that corporations and businesses exercise their power over workers," Kitty Richards, acting executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, told Business Insider.
Over the past 20 or 30 years, workers have been getting "short-changed" by their employers to pad bottom lines in every way possible, Richards said. That includes firms cutting labor costs — which can include cutting benefits, and ensuring that there's any slack in staffing schedules, "and then making it the problem of the employees to figure out how they're going to cover shifts."
"It really is just another way of employers cutting their costs and pushing the consequences of that onto their workers," Richards said.
Betsy Cardenas has been on both sides of the equation. She's experienced life working as a childfree professional amongst coworkers with children, and then navigating the workforce with a young child. She's seen a shift in workers' willingness to push back on the work heaped on them.
"I think before there was more of a philosophy of like, well, I need to pay my dues just like so-and-so did, and I think now people are more willing to make demands of their employers and quit if things aren't going the right way," said Cardenas, who runs a creative studio.
If workers slowly push back against monopsony — through demanding higher wages, and more flexibility, and unionizing for more legal protections and benefits — they could start to see more accommodations like onsite childcare, or more fully staffed workforces. And it can also come down to better public policy, like affordable childcare and parental leave.
"We all need to band together and realize that these are class struggles we're experiencing, these are worker-versus-employer struggles we're experiencing — we're not experiencing a parent versus nonparent," Cardenas said, adding: "I think we need to zoom out and see how are the larger systemic issues making us all — parents and non-parents — feel like we have to compete for jobs, and we have to compete for wages while corporations are having record billion dollar profits every year."