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A Silent Crisis: Working Caregivers
Are Begging For Help

At time when private enterprises are trying to increase productivity, reduce costs and enhance the quality of their products or services there is a growing crisis in corporations today that is preventing them from achieving their corporate goals. Few companies realize the implications working caregivers have on their internal costs and their bottom line. Still fewer companies even know where to look for these hidden costs. Only one in seventy midsize to larger companies knows how to address this issue.

The closest thing a company associates with the cost of caregiving to the company is the absenteeism reports. Even in cases where absenteeism is recorded, the relationship between the numbers of days missed by workers and the reason for the number of days is not clearly established. Absenteeism may be the most obvious cost to the workforce, but it is not the only cost or the most expensive cost. Other factors such as attrition, loss of good workers, increased health insurance coverage, overtime, and constant recruitment of new workers also cost the company and the workers.

The number of caregivers in the workforce has increased threefold in the last five years and will continue to increase in the next ten years. What we are seeing today is only the beginning and unless companies begin to help their working caregivers they themselves will not be able to keep their competitive advantage in the global economy. This is no longer a problem that affects only women in the workforce or lower income workers, but is a problem that exists at the CEO level as well as the lower administrative levels of the company echelon. This is a problem that also affects working men, and young and older workers alike. For years the problem has been handled by the mid level managers who have used leniency in granting permission for workers to leave early, come late, refuse to work overtime and while the managers have done their best to help good workers balance jobs and work the poor workers have been left alone to tackle the problem. For years the problem has been handled silently by the working caregiver who has given up promotions, careers, training opportunities to provide care to a family member. But these individual solutions are no longer appropriate or recommended.

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