IT SEEMED a fair enough question to ask a friend: “Are you doing anything nice on Bank Holiday Monday?” But such was the ferocity of his reply that 24 hours later I am still picking his spittle out of my hair.
On Monday he will be working. Again. Because people without children always work Bank Holidays. Parents colonise everything. Christmas, Easter, the whole of August. The workplace, he says, is shamelessly skewed in favour of the fecund.
Ah, I remember those days — when the world seemed irrevocably divided into breeders and non-breeders. Inevitably it was us, the ones without kiddiwinks, who would hold the fort over the summer while parents bonded smugly with their progeny. It was us having the dysfunctional Christmases that involved being back at our desks on Boxing Day and who barely noticed when a Bank Holiday loomed because they had long ceased to be relevant to our lives. With martyr face firmly fixed, I recall once working five consecutive Christmas Days.
Workplaces bubble with resentment over favours that are unquestionably granted to parents but denied to the childless. Early finish to see a nativity play: good. Early finish to to catch a plane for a minibreak in Rome: bad. There are gripes that women returning from maternity leave are so rarely off the phone to their nannies that they never pull their weight again.
Since I recently joined the breeders and have experienced life on the other side of the fence I can offer this observation: employees with children don’t tend to be slackers. Boring colleagues? Hell, yes. Not only can we never go for a drink after work any more, we tend to speak in sentences comprising only the following words: Tired, nanny, nursery, MMR, catchment area, schools, school, schools.
But show me a working mother and I’ll show you someone with a rocket up their backside. Nothing, trust me, focuses the mind better than a non- negotiable nursery pick-up time or the misery you’ll feel if you’re not home for bathtime. No more hungover mornings or gossiping at the watercooler for you. You get your head down and work like a dervish — often for less money.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that before they have children, female workers have an average wage that is 91 per cent of the male average but declines to 67 per cent for working mothers. If you still think mummies have it cushy, remember that the Equalities Review found that disabled people and ethnic minorities are more likely to be offered a job than a woman with children.
Yet none of this changes my view that the childless (or childfree, whichever you prefer) are largely taken for granted. They are invariably the unsung heroes of the workplace, the troupers whose flexibility facilitates the smooth running of a business 365 days a year. Only thanks to them do the majority of parents get to block-book the wallplanner at key times of the year and return with grinning photos to display around the office. So how galling must it be to receive the message that your needs and lifestyle choices are somehow less valid than those of someone who happens to have successfully mated? Or that parents have the monopoly on fatigue? But if you protest, you risk being labelled as a bitter baby-hater.
Hence the growth of websites such as nokidding.com, unmarriedamerica.com and kiddingaside.net, which campaign for equal rights for non-parents. It must be said that some internet material is unedifying — triumphant tales of sterilisation operations; griping about parents automatically getting time off to care for sick children (the day that stops happening we are surely all going to hell in a handcart) — and carries the distinct whiff of child loathing.
But the general cry to stop discrimination against non-parents is irrefutable. Birth rates across Europe are declining: 28 per cent of degree- educated women currently end their reproductive lives childless. We risk alienating a significant proportion of the workforce if we don’t redress the balance a little. Why, they ask, should parents get preferential treatment, subsidies, tax breaks and unscheduled time off when the childfree are not afforded the same privilege if, say, an elderly parent needed caring for?
As a (childless by choice) friend is fond of saying: “Think how much money I’ve saved my company by not having kids. I won’t be claiming maternity leave or taking random time off for the nanny being ill. But if I suggested trading that in for, say, a short sabbatical, my boss would laugh in my face.” Yes, she says, other people’s kids will be working to pay her pension in 25 years time. But right now she’s paying for their education. Meanwhile, she throws in her tenner to the latest collection for another colleague’s newborn with a smile because she doesn’t want to be seen as a grinch.
It goes without saying that it was not only right but essential that working parents’ rights have improved to such an extent. And though maternity — and paternity — leave are not holidays in the sun, they are a priceless offshoot from the relentless motorway that is the 45-year working life. After years of taking up the slack, child- less workers deserve a similar break.
That said, one of the best kept secrets of the non-breeder is that working Bank Holidays is usually a doddle. There’s no traffic on the roads, little to do and you don’t have to spend the day at B&Q. Yet you bask in glory of being a hero. But, ssshh. If you don’t say anything, neither will I.
- LOATH as one is to question the good works of Saint Cliff of Barbados, I am puzzled by an interview this week in which he explains why he lends the family Blair his holiday villa. “I first lent them my house in Barbados,” says Sir Cliff, “because I saw Tony on the television during the war and he seemed dwindled and haggard and I thought, well, whatever gave him the motivation to take that decision (to go to war), he must have felt he had to do it. The idea was to do a good deed for someone doing a terrible job.”
Now the last time I looked, Cliff Richard was a tub-thumping Christian. Call me passé but I would have thought it more appropriate that he extend his sympathy to the victims of this dodgy war rather than the bloke who helped to start it. But who am I to suggest that offering a roof to a few limbless Iraqis seems a more Christian gesture than giving it to an unrepentant prime minister? The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.
