Promoting family-friendly policies Is the basis of the Government’s ethical standpoint viable? Ian Roper Middlesex University Business School, London, UK Ian Cunningham University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, and Phil James Middlesex University Business School, London, UK Keywords Work, Family life, Regulations, Ethics Abstract This article examines how human resource (HR) practitioners are responding to the current UK Government’s “business case” approach to promoting family-friendly policies. The ethical basis of the Government’s approach to work-life balance is examined and the results of a survey of HR practitioners’ views on this issue are presented. Findings indicate that, when examining the interdependent factors that determine the ethical basis of support and opposition to such policies, respondents are more likely to reject the Government’s rationale on equal and opposite terms to which they are being promoted. Introduction This article examines management attitudes towards government attempts to promote family-friendly employment policies via provisions in the Employment Relations Act 1999 (ERA) which acted to provide employees with up to three months unpaid parental leave, extend the minimum period of maternity leave from 14 to 18 weeks and allow employees time off work to attend to “family emergencies”. More specifically, it is concerned with establishing the ethical basis of managers’ opposition and/or support for these measures and the extent to which they are convergent with the Government’s promotion of “family- friendly” policies on utilitarian “pro-business” ethical grounds: that is, that family-friendly policies are good because they are good for business. Initially, the Labour Government’s approach to employment regulation is examined and attention paid to how this approach has influenced the way in which the issues of work-life balance and family-friendly policies have been approached. The second section then considers the ethical issues entwined within the “work-life balance” issue. The third and fourth sections subsequently provide an outline of a study conducted by the authors to investigate employer responses to the ERA and analyse the findings obtained. The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm Promoting family-friendly policies 211 Received May 2002 Accepted September 2002 Personnel Review Vol. 32 No. 2, 2003 pp. 211-230 q MCB UP Limited 0048-3486 DOI 10.1108/00483480310460225