The term “work-life balance” has become popular worldwide in recent years. The idea of work-leisure balance was invented in the mid-1800s, and the term work-life balance was firstly used in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s.
Work-life balance is often misunderstood to mean people should have more leisure even if companies earn less money. According to the Personal Efficiency Program, however, personal efficiency is the key to achieve work-life balance. In other words, employees are evaluated based on their productivity. Therefore, work-life balance can help employers and employees at the same time by paying wages based on the efficiency of work.
If we want to work at a company where employers are evaluated by efficiency of work, paternity leave acts as a barometer for checking whether work-life balance works well in the company.
One of the difficulties that working fathers and mothers have is both parents being involved in the parenting process. When both fathers and mothers are working, it is almost impossible to raise children unless the spouses are able to help each other. The first step for helping each other during raising a child is parental leave. If a workplace provides work-life balance, it would be easier to take time off after a baby is born. This is because work-life balance cares only about efficiency of work, and being efficient at work means allowing workers time to leave the workplace and enjoy life.
Some college students have a motivation to work at a place where they can be satisfied with both vocation and vacation. The motivation has become more significant recently because women are taking more influential roles in the business sector. For example, General Motors appointed their first woman CEO. This change makes couples economically stable and also helps to achieve social progress for women.
“I am not saying that women and men are exactly the same, but I don’t believe all the responsibility should fall on shoulders of women,” says Thomas Jaime, a doctoral student in UW-Madison. He took an unpaid week off soon after his daughter was born in the beginning of October 2014. He decided to take a week off because he thought it would be too difficult if his wife had to do all the housework alone on top of needing to breast feed. Recalling the experience of taking his week off, he said he is quite satisfied with supporting his family this way, and so is his wife.
In terms of the workplace, Thomas Jaime could not have chosen a much better job to have when a child is born. It’s easier for Doctoral students to take time off than for professors. Still, he could not have taken a week off without an understanding boss and colleagues.
“Doctoral students are more flexible than standard jobs,” Thomas Jaime said. Before he left his job for a week, he looked for a colleague to act as a substitute in his classes, things went well except for the surprise birth of the baby. “She came here quite early, and I did not communicate with my boss first.” As we all know, the birth of a baby is not always punctual. Still, Thomas could take time off with the understanding of his colleagues and supervisors for his involvement in parenting.
College students have a bunch of opportunities, from choosing whatever we want to study, where we want to work and when we want to have class. An ideal company would vary from person to person, because some students have decided they will not have a family and will work to achieve a higher career status. However, if students are planning to make their own family in the future, then they need to consider how well work-life balance applies in each company they are applying to.
In this country, many people do not value leave and vacation compared to European countries. For me it is surprising that people in the U.S. work so hard and long because I thought America was a nation of liberty. However, the U.S. has no mandatory paid holidays or vacation, although many other industrialized countries have at the very least 10 paid vacation days per year. For example, New Zealand requires no less than four weeks paid vacation and Norway requires employers give employees 25 working days of paid vacation. Thus, college students in America should be more careful about the system of maternity/paternity leave their future employer may offer since the United States does not legislate mandatory paid vacation or maternity/paternity leave.
It is time that a new era comes forth where people should seriously reconsider the term work-life balance because more and more women have played a significant role in companies in recent decades. If couples continuously work, they cannot raise children without supporting each other. Thus, if college students are planning to have a family in the future, they should choose a company which evaluates employees by their productivity.
Yukako Hirakawa is a new writer for The Daily Cardinal. Do you agree or disagree with her stance on mandatory paid vacation in the United States? Does the United States not need mandatory paid vacation? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
