The plight of the hidden carers in your workforce

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I can’t remember when the idea came to me, but sometime this year I realized that if employers conducted an audit to see how many employees were working hard while also caring for elderly relatives, the results would be staggering .

Almost overnight, it seemed like everyone I knew in their forties and fifties was struggling to fit caring responsibilities into their busy daily routines, with mixed results.

There was a man who was rushing around a hospital abroad, trying to arrange care for his mother in her 70s after she fell, but he was reprimanded by his boss for making a mistake in his work.

One woman, sitting on the floor of a deskless bedroom while her father-in-law lay dying upstairs, held on to a long-standing commitment to speak at an online conference.

There were also multiple couples, some with preteens, whose weekends and vacations turned into a blur of highway sprints and train journeys to care for two sets of deteriorating parents.

Remarkably not all of this care was implemented. As people live longer, they inevitably need help from relatives.Researchers estimate that the equivalent of 600 people Giving up paid employment in the UK every day to care. Most are women.

Women have a 50:50 chance of becoming a caregiver by age 46, while men face the same odds by age 57, with official figures showing at least 5.7 million Total number of unpaid carers in the UK.

But what my friends were doing was even more remarkable because of the added layer of stress due to the sneaky actions.

They took multiple days off to care for their families, but it was a far cry from the time off that many of them sorely needed.

Few managers know what is going on. Some worry that reporting their situation to superiors will cause harm to their careers. Others doubt their managers will help.

“Companies should really do a better job of tracking this,” said one man who took a week off this year after his elderly mother fell. Another time was when she crashed her car, and another time when she spent a day in the hospital undergoing tests for dementia.

“I would be completely exhausted,” he said. “Managers should know what’s going on in people’s lives.”

They should. But there’s a good reason why caregiving leave gets less attention: Unlike other types of family leave, employers are generally not required by law to provide it.

Leave to help working parents care for children has existed for many years in many parts of the world, as have leaves after childbirth or adoption. Some countries go further. In Japan, a country with one of the oldest populations in the world, workers have the legal right to take time off for care, plus additional breaks. days of leave For care.

It was only this year that the UK Parliament passed the Carers’ Leave Bill, which allows workers caring for relatives or dependents to take one week of unpaid leave each year. For the caregivers I know, a week is not enough, but the new law should still have a big impact.

“This will make this type of care more visible,” said Emily Holzhausen, policy director at Carers UK. This visibility will make it easier to apply for and arrange carers leave.

It would be better if more employers followed the lead of companies such as British energy group Centrica. For more than a decade it has offered 10 days of paid carers’ leave, and in 2019 it allowed a further 10 days of paid carers’ leave if taken together with corresponding annual leave – so if two days off are required , one of which is carer’s leave and the other is annual leave.

Costly and prone to abuse? Centric said no. Before the outbreak, its employees only enjoyed an average of 3.4 days of packaged leave per year.It will calculate the strategy to save it £1.8 million per year Avoid unplanned absences and poor performance, and invest an additional £1.3m to retain people who might otherwise leave.

Not all employers are as large as Centrica, but the business case they make for more generous care leave is compelling. Meanwhile, the number of human cases is huge and growing.