Millions of staff are quietly juggling busy jobs with demanding caring duties that need more recognition.
I don’t remember exactly when the thought struck me but at some point this year, I realised that if employers did an audit to see how many of their staff were trying to work while taking care of an ageing relative, the results would be stunning.
And there were multiple couples, some with pre-teen children, whose weekends and holidays had become a blur of motorway dashes and train trips to attend to two sets of deteriorating parents.The striking thing was not that all this care was being done. As people live longer, they inevitably need help from relatives who want to give it. Researchers estimate the equivalent of 600 people a day give up paid work in the UK to care. Most are female.
They repeatedly took vacation time for caring that was not remotely like the holiday a lot of them very much needed.. Some feared that alerting a superior to their situation would spell career harm. Others doubted their manager would help. It took until this year for the UK parliament to pass the Carers Leave Act, which allows one week of unpaid leave a year for workers caring for a relative or dependant. One week wouldn’t be enough for the carers I know, but the new law should still make a big difference.
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