Jo Whitfield’s leave from Co-op is an exercise in privilege as well as change
Last week, Jo Whitfield, the head of the Co-operative Society’s food arm, announced she would be taking four months of unpaid leave later in the year to help her sons through their A-level and GCSE examinations.
On the one hand, the Co-op was lauded for its progressive and flexible approach to employment, and for allowing employees to try to balance their personal and professional lives. It is, of course, very zeitgeisty as we come to terms with Covid disruption and re-examine with a critical eye the way we engage with our working existence. Parents have spent two years hugger-mugger with their children, who have in turn experienced tremendous disruption to their young lives.
On the other hand, some murmured that this was the cause of some queasiness. Here was a very senior female executive, well regarded, taking advantage of a kindly meant scheme of unpaid leave which relies, of course, on the employee’s ability to do without a salary for that period. In the right light, it could look like another exercise of entrenched privilege: Whitfield was paid £1.2 million in total in 2020. A cashier or shelf-stacker might not be able to face a third of a year unpaid with the same equanimity.
Both points of view have weight, and both, unfortunately, already bear the faint outline of the all-pervading culture wars. But let us try to analyse the situation carefully and dispassionately. We are in the age of the Great Resignation, with people leaving their jobs in record numbers, reassessing their careers and experimenting with different lifestyles.
The balance of power between employers and employees is now an extraordinarily complex one: good people are hard to find, but companies are also very keen to return to something like the old way of working, shying away from the wholesale embrace of remote working in favour of some kind of hybrid arrangement which will (they hope) retain the benefits of proximity.
What is clear is that employers must think more carefully about their offer to potential candidates. There are firms in London who are having to dangle contracts in front of applicants halfway through the application process simply to prevent them looking elsewhere.
In this atmosphere, the Co-op’s unpaid leave policy seems an attractive benefit for those who wish to have some flexibility in their lives. It is particularly helpful to women, who are more likely to need that kind of flexibility, and so is another crack, however modest, in the glass ceiling.
But employers must always be careful that benefits are based on equality of opportunity. While it is convenient for a senior executive on a seven-figure remuneration package to be able to drop out for four months and help her children at a stressful time, it would be interesting to know what the take-up of this opportunity is among the Co-op’s lower-paid staff.
All employees who have served more than a year are eligible to apply for a career break of between three and 12 months; but if their application is turned down, they must wait another year before applying again. And, to reiterate: this career break is unpaid. So it is an offer with a strong financial element.
We should not be too censorious. If a major employer like the Co-operative Society, with 65,000 workers, chooses to offer a way for employees to have a little more control over their lives and the way in which they structure their working time, we should applaud that, even if it is partly a matter of self-interest in terms of recruitment and retention.
Nor, however, should we be distracted by the shiny things thrown in front of the media. The case of Jo Whitfield is of a very well-off, successful woman providing additional support to her children as they face examinations. It is not a revolution in the status of women at work; it is an exercise of privilege, without any suggestion that Whitfield has not earned that privilege.
The aftermath of the pandemic is an opportunity for business to look at how it operates in the round. We should all be looking at rights and opportunities for employees, in conjunction with the needs of their employers, and attempting to find a more harmonious balance for everyone. This chance will not come again in anything like its current form; so let us be imaginative, creative and adventurous. A top executive having a few months off is a charming story, but the real picture needs to be much wider.