The internet and media were alight last week with commentary about Facebook and Apple offering employees a reproductive perk. The companies have said that they either currently do or plan to pay the cost of female US-based employees freezing their eggs – should they choose to do so.
According to Time magazine, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase also include this in their employee coverage, with Microsoft including "some pre-emptive coverage" and Google currently considering it. Anything that helps women not lose their minds in workplaces that are completely orientated around men's attitudes, needs, and ultimate retention of power is a good thing. Part of this should, of course, focus on facilitating the childcare and parenting needs of female workers, considering society still places the vast majority of the burden of parenting and childcare on women.
At one end of the spectrum, the egg-freezing incentive is just another cool perk that makes people jealous of employees in big tech companies with their beer fridges, pinball machines, and the peer pressure to travel to work via skateboard. At the other end is the tech industry’s belief that the entire issue of gender in the workplace, like all issues, can be met with a technological solution.
Tech is an evangelical sport, and therefore technology can solve every problem it encounters. Why don’t you just freeze your eggs? Why don’t you just completely redesign corporate culture so it’s not unfairly patriarchal? Oh. But ultimately, the dominant tone of the perk is something the massive companies are quite good at, slightly creepily attaching themselves to their employees’ private lives.
Twenty-year careers in one place, gold watches upon retirement, employee picnics and team-bonding sessions should feel like fossils in the fast-moving, unstable, contract-based, exploitative work environment that 21st century capitalism has embraced, yet we have entered a new era of employer involvement in employees’ lives, primarily driven by the tech industry.
When companies try to get involved in your life, it just appears weird. It’s why Irish companies are bad at personifying themselves with things like mascots and superficial mottos.
But today, there is a special type of cult-y flavour to the perception of large tech companies. Their workers appear uncritical – at least superficially – and label themselves with collective nouns related to the company name.
Their leaders are held up like infallible deities, who preach to vast numbers of people in front of giant screens emblazoned with their face. This flies in the face of the Irish suspicion of an overarching authority. There has never been a successful Irish cult because Irish people don’t understand charismatic leadership. This is why even politicians on our election posters tend to be either dour or forcing grimaces – Brian Hayes’s gameshow-host grin in the last European election literature notwithstanding.
We should always be suspicious of employers wanting to involve themselves in our lives, because a company’s job is to create profit. All the perks and niceties in the world, while they might improve employees lives, are still about the same thing: making money. Companies involving themselves in four things that generally occur outside an office for workers: mealtimes, play, exercise and sleep, means that the office becomes the centre of one’s life, not just a stop along a route. What is the point of work-life balance when the things you’re meant to balance work with happen to also be at the office? The idea of companies influencing reproductive choices is a continuation not just of an involvement in employees’ lives, but an ownership of them. We should endeavour to distance our private lives as much as possible from our working lives.
Richard Branson’s recent move to offer workers unlimited leave re-enforces his benevolence, but there’s also a paradox regarding the amount of time we work and the time we take off. According to the Vacation Deprivation Index collated by Expedia in 2012, Irish workers have on average 21 days’ holiday a year, and use 20 of those.
We are classed as ‘vacation-moderate’, with the US, Canada, Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Mexico classed as ‘vacation-poor’, and our European neighbours Germany, France, Spain and Denmark classed as ‘vacation-rich’. The most interesting paradox is that workers in the US earn fewer days off than most countries in the world (aside from Taiwan and South Korea), yet are more likely to leave some of the few days that they have off unused. Even when given the opportunity to take a break, they cut it short. The more you make people work, the less likely they are to rest, even though they are much more likely to need a break. It’s an impossible equation.
While time off is a good thing, and perks can be incredibly useful, employees need to remember where they begin and their companies end. Investing time in your work, and not necessarily your company, means you get better at your profession even if your employer changes. Our own private desires and goals should dictate how we live, not profit-baiting perks, be they free lunches or frozen eggs.