THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the First Lady
_______________________________________________________
For Immediate Release May 7, 2009
Mayflower Hotel
Washington, D.C.
10:26 A.M. EDT
MRS. OBAMA: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Donna, and
thanks to all of you who are part of the Corporate Voices for Working
Families. I'm happy to join you today as you begin this annual
meeting. This is a very good thing, and I am so glad I could be here.
Many of the issues that you'll be discussing are issues that, as you
know, are near and dear to my heart. I personally, as Donna described,
know the challenges of leading a busy life at work and at home, trying
to do a good job at both -- and always feeling like you're not quite
living up to either -- and trying not to pit one against the other,
really trying to balance it so that -- if people here are like me -- I
call myself a 120-percenter. If I'm not doing any job at 120 percent,
I think I'm failing. So if you're trying to do that at home and at
work, you find it very difficult and stressful and frustrating.
And even though my current life, trust me, is very different than it
was and for most people -- and I do know that; I know that right now I
am living, as challenging as it may seem, in a very blessed situation,
because I have what most families don't have, is tons of support all
around, not just my mother but staff and administration. I have a
Chief of Staff and a personal assistant, and everyone needs that;
that's what we need. (Laughter.) Everyone should have a Chief of
Staff and a set of personal assistants. (Applause.)
But one thing I know from meeting women and men across the country is
that the work-life challenges that I've faced aren't different from the
challenges facing other families and undoubtedly many of you.
Things are very different for working families than when many of us
were growing up. I talked about this a lot on the campaign trail.
When I look back on my childhood and the life that my parents provided,
working-class folks with not a lot of money, my father was a
blue-collar city worker who worked a shift job. But because he earned
enough as a shift worker without a college degree, he could still
support a family of four on that salary. And because he could, with
that salary, support us -- we rented a home, we didn't live lavishly --
my mother was able to stay at home. She could afford to make the
choice not to go to work while we were growing up. That was how
families balanced back then.
But things are very different today. One income really doesn't always
cut it anymore. And that's in my lifetime. In most families, both
parents have to work, and even if people want to make the choice to
stay home. And again, there is no subjective analysis or -- of what is
better. But people can't make the choice. It's even harder for single
parents, and there are millions of them all across this country who are
trying to build a life for themselves and their children, and they find
in an economy that's tough that they're not just holding down one but
they need a couple of jobs just to make ends meet.
Twenty-two million working women don't have a single paid sick day.
That means they lose money any time they have to stay home to take care
of their kids. You know, imagine making that choice. And we do it all
the time. And even when I had sick leave, I found myself, you know,
hoping that the kids would stay well, just I couldn't afford to take
the day off because there was a meeting, or something was going on. So
your whole life is just contingent upon everything working perfectly.
So imagine families who don't have any sick time. So if somebody gets
sick, they have to take time off, and they lose the money that they
can't afford.
So there are a lot of people counting on us to figure this out. And
one of the reasons I was interested in joining you today is because the
research that you do provides a solid foundation for the conversations
that we need to have on these issues.
Through your work, the private sector, government and other key
stakeholders can have a real dialogue based on facts, find common
ground and then develop innovative policies that can help employees
manage their work and family obligations, without going crazy.
In promoting best practices –- some of which I believe we'll hear about
today, and I'm really looking forward to hearing about how some
companies are making it work, because that's how we're going to figure
this out, looking at the best practices and figuring out how we can
replicate that -- employers here learn how to implement programs that
are beneficial to the bottom line.
That's something that I learned as a manager, is that when you provide
programs that enable employees to remain productive in their work,
which everybody wants to do -- I know few people who don't want to do
their very best at their job -- but in order for them to do this, they
have to feel like their home life is stable and manageable.
So I found that as I've managed staff, the more flexibility and
opportunities that I gave them to be good parents, the more commitment
that they made to working with me, the less likely they were to leave
because they wouldn't find the same sort of situation somewhere else.
So this isn't just about family balance. This is about making work
places stronger and more effective, and keeping and attracting the most
qualified people. This research is critical to empowering employers
and is politically -- particularly important during our current
economic climate.
We need to discuss flexible work hours that give employees greater
ability to attend to important family responsibilities like child
pick-up, something as simple as that; doctors appointments for those
not just with kids, but for people with elderly parents. We're finding
more and more that families are in that crunch, as well.
We need to discuss paid leave for birth or adoption of a child and when there's a serious illness that arises.
We need to discuss quality on-site child care, something that keeps
many of us up at night as families; you're just wondering where are we
going to put our children where we feel like that they're being safe --
that they're safe and being loved. That will relieve many of the
stresses that parents feel on the job throughout the day.
These types of policies can be the key to whether a family remains economically viable or slips into financial uncertainty.
I expect this day to be the first of what will be for me many
conversations that I'll get a chance to participate in. We need to
find ways to encourage other employers to follow your lead and adopt
work-life policies that afford employees flexibility and much-needed
support. We want to work together to make clear that, again, investing
in these types of policies pays off for employers as well as the
employees.
So I am honored to be here. I am looking forward to learning more
about what works, what doesn't work, what's economically feasible, what
I can do to be of help in furthering some of these agendas.
So with that, I will stop and do what I love to do best, which is listen and learn. So thank you for having me. (Applause.)
END
10:34 A.M. EDT
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