I haven’t shared much in the last several months.  Like many, the omicron variant threw our family into turmoil.  Between Christmas and March, our daughter was in school a total of six days due to a horrible mix of classroom shut downs, quarantine mandates, and our decision to keep her home while the virus was raging in our city.  My husband and I are fortunate to have understanding superiors at work.  But even with that, it was overwhelming.  It was worse for so many others.  And I know this because in the last several months, client after client has come to me completely overwhelmed and drained.  Many have sought one-on-one meetings to help make a plan and calm the panic about their employers’ return to office mandates.

I offer the below as a draft letter to a fictional human resources director.  I hope you find some catharsis in reading it or sharing it with other working parents.  

________________________________________________________________

Dear Human Resource Automaton,

I would like to request yet another exemption from the company’s return to office mandate.  As I’ve previously shared, I do not feel comfortable with in-person work, for any number of days per week, as vaccines are still not yet available for my toddler.

 While I understand a collective desire to return to the “beforetimes,” those of us with household members who are immunocompromised, under five, or otherwise vulnerable, are living in the same hell that we have been since early 2020.  The biggest difference now is: things are worse for us.  In 2020, you proclaimed loudly and repeatedly to be “people first” and pretended to accommodate as we juggled work demands and parenting simultaneously.  

 But now company leadership has revealed themselves to not at all be “people first,” ignoring the pleading of those of us still living under the dread that our children, who do not have any antibodies to a virus that has killed more than a million people in America, are especially vulnerable.  And while many children who have become infected appear to recover, others have been hospitalized, put in ICUs, and died—and this is to say nothing about concerns about unknown potential long-term impacts for those that appear to fully recover. 

 Having needed to write these two explanatory paragraphs to you demonstrates how drastically out of touch you are with the realities of employees with young children at home.  But having previously explained this all to you on multiple occasions, and given the presence of ubiquitous news coverage of our plight, I can reach only one conclusion–you are not out of touch, you simply do not care.  You do not care that coming into an office requires us to expose ourselves, and by extension our children, to maskless and potentially unvaccinated people on public transportation and in the building’s elevators.  Your office-wide vaccine mandate is of little to no comfort following the Omicron peak, when it was made painfully clear by data and anecdote that breakthrough infections were the rule and not the exception, and each infected person increased the community spread that increased the threat to our children.  Your return-to-office policy is forcing me to play Russian roulette with my child’s cardiovascular and respiratory system.

 A personal exemption from the in office mandate is the bare minimum that I’m seeking.  But you should know that your continual insistence on setting a return to office plan before more than 6% of our country’s population, constituting many of the most vulnerable in our society, can be vaccinated, reveals a callousness that has forever lost my loyalty and the loyalty of all those similarly situated.  This pandemic has revealed that employers would rather see “butts in seats” than alleviate any of the constant stress parents of young children experience.  We know this is not about productivity, but instead about control, as productivity has increased over the past two years–with the average person working two hours more per day than before the pandemic.

 But clearly “people first” was just another slogan with no meaning.  In the last two years, we have also witnessed HR’s repeated declarations of the company’s commitment to “antiracism” and promoting “equity in the workplace.”  Your return to office policy flies in the face of those values, as we know women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ employees overwhelmingly prefer to work from home, in part to escape microaggressions on the commute and within the office.  

 Your inability to offer accommodations for our children while the deadly pandemic continues to rage and your unwillingness to alleviate some of the strain women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people face on a daily basis in the workplace is, quite frankly, abhorrent.  

 If you are unable to accommodate my request to work from home until my child can be vaccinated, and you feel that you need to replace me with someone who does not have a vulnerable person in their household, know that I am happy to continue working from home until you find a replacement or until I find a permanently remote position, whichever comes first.  I’m happy to take that gamble.  What I won’t gamble with is my child’s health or life.

 Sincerely,

Employee with a toddler