PARENTAL LEAVE POLICY: FLEXIBLE OR ARBITRARY?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00530R000400740002-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 27, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: September 1, 1988
• Content Type: MISC

Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/08/21 : CIA-RDP90-00530R000400740002-0
THE WASHINGTOi
THE FEDE1
Parental Leave
Policy: Flexible
Or Arbitrary?
By Judith Havemann
Washington Post Staff Writer
When Justice Department attorney Joan Bernott
asked for six months' maternity leave without pay fol-
lowing a difficult childbirth, she almost got fired.
Bernott' s boss, civil division chief John R. Bolton dis-
puted her claim that she was too sick to work because
he thought she had not produced adequate medical ev-
idence. He threatened to fire her June 1 if she didn't
show up at the office.
Faced with the threat, Bernott produced her medical
records. While Bolton gave her an official reprimand for
her conduct, he backed down on firing her, according to
Bernott's attorney. She plans to return to work Oct. 3.
The controversy was an extreme example of a man-
ager taking a tough approach to a parental leave re-
quest, according to specialists in the field. Bolton said
last night he was "fully satisfied with the outcome." He
described his handling of the affair as reasonable and
justified by the enormous workload in his division.
More commonly, short leaves are routinely granted,
and on occasion the government bends over backwards
to accommodate an employee in need.
The government's leave policies are so flexible that
they allow managers to grant sick leave in certain cir-
cumstances, advance sick leave, approve annual leave,
advance annual leave, grant leave without pay, autho-
rize part-time work, job sharing or flexible work sched-
ules?or to refuse to do any of them.
Sometimes the flexibility is stretched to its limit on
behalf of employees. That happened for Army computer
programmer Karen Sefton, who received months of
accrued, advanced, and shared leave while her young
daughter was dying of cancer. Sefton, a GS12, had an
understanding chain of experienced bosses and a heart-
rending, undeniable need.
Bernott, a member of the Senior Executive Service,
had a boss who had never met her. She was reluctant to
have her medical records passed around the Justice
Department. And her case involved childbirth, which
evoked mixed reactions from coworkers, with some
being more sympathetic about time off than others.
The parental leave policy debate is the latest example
of the tension over the need for regulations to protect
against arbitrariness and the need for deregulation to
prevent the government from being smothered by rules.
It is part of the current political debate on family is-
sues; a parental leave bill is the next item on the Senate
agenda after minimum wage legislation.
The Senate bill would require the federal govern-
ment to grant employees up to 18 weeks of family leave
and up to 26 weeks of sick leave with medical certifi-
cation in a two-year period. If enacted, it would give
federal workers a clearly defined new right and federal
managers a new set of constraints.
"Federal managers are extremely put upon by regu-
latory requirements," said Constance Horner, director
of the Office of Personnel Management. "I don't want to
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Joan Bernott almost lost job for seeking six months' leave.
do anything to constrain them, but at the same time I
want to use my bully pulpit to say this is an important
issue, and managers should bend over backwards to
accommodate family needs.
"There is now available in the federal government
tremendous opportunities for meshing work life and
family life," she said. "Federal managers and employees
need to take a look at these options systematically and
make sure they get used when they need to be used."
But, she said, she has no intention of issuing "march-
ing orders to agency management." Lower-level OPM
officials, though, are quick to note that Bernott ulti-
mately won as much maternity leave as she wanted.
"A bureaucracy is a political entity and has its own
methods of discipline," Homer said. "If a good worker
who pulls his or her own weight isn't treated right, that
worker's peers have methods of making managers do
the right thing even if they don't want to."
Andrew Feinstein, staff director of the House civil
service subcommittee, said the problem with the fed-
eral government's leave policies is that "people get hurt
at both ends. If you are a very good performer, you
don't get leave because you can't be spared and if
you're a very poor performer you don't get leave be-
cause your supervisor doesn't like you.
Years ago, the Federal Personnel Manual stated that
reasonable maternity leave was generally in the range
of six weeks before childbirth and eight weeks after,
and many federal managers once used that as a general
rule of thumb, according to Claudia Cooley, OPM as-
sociate director.
Horner's efforts to encourage managers to grant,
"reasonable" leave requests for dependent care?not
just of children, but of elderly parents and other family
needs?began in 1986 and have worked relatively
smoothly for the majority of federal employees, by
OPM accounts.
Of 7,000 federal arbitration cases in recent years,
only 19 have involved the denial of leave to care for
dependents, Homer said. "This doesn't mean there are
no problems," she said, "but it suggests that people
have been working them out pretty well."
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Declassified and Approved For Release 2012/08/21 : CIA-RDP90-00530R000400740002-0
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