Tomorrow, the world marks International Workers’ Day. It will not mention the parents courts have already clocked out.
Part one of a three-part May Day series on parental rights and the systems that fail working families.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Every year on May 1st, labor advocates remind the world that the rights workers take for granted — the eight-hour day, the weekend, the right to organize — were not given freely. They were extracted from institutions that had every incentive to keep things exactly as they were.
Family court is one of the few remaining institutional systems where that extraction has not yet happened.
The labor movement’s foundational argument was simple: when a system imposes costs on individuals without accountability, those individuals have no recourse but collective action. The costs keep compounding. The institution keeps moving. And the people bearing the weight keep being told the process is working as intended.
I have seen this firsthand. The costs of a contested custody proceeding do not end when a judge signs an order. For parents navigating non-enforcement — where a court-ordered parenting schedule exists on paper but is not upheld in practice — the financial and economic damage accumulates in ways that no labor protection was ever designed to address.
What the Labor Movement Won
The eight-hour day did not just give workers rest. It gave them predictability — the ability to plan a life around a schedule they could count on.
Parenting plans are supposed to do the same thing. A custody order is, in the most basic sense, a schedule. It tells a parent when they are expected to be present, when they are responsible for a child’s care, and when they have the right to time with their own child. Courts issue these orders with the same authority they issue any other legal directive.
The difference is enforcement.
A worker whose employer violates wage-and-hour law has a regulatory infrastructure built to hear that complaint. The Department of Labor exists. Wage theft has a name, a legal category, and a mechanism for recovery. The employer faces real consequences.
A parent whose co-parent violates a custody order enters a system with almost none of that infrastructure. Contempt proceedings are expensive, slow, and discretionary. Courts that declined to enforce an order once face no institutional consequence for declining to enforce it again. There is no regulatory body. There is no equivalent of the Department of Labor for parenting time.
The labor movement spent decades arguing that unenforceable rights are not rights at all. Family court has not yet had that argument made loudly enough.
The Economic Cost Nobody Counts
When labor researchers document the cost of wage theft, they count lost wages. When they document workplace injury, they count medical costs, lost productivity, and reduced lifetime earnings.
Nobody is systematically counting the economic cost of the non-enforcement of custody orders.
I have seen this firsthand: the attorney fees required just to file for contempt. The time you’ll spend if you file pro se. The time taken from work to attend hearings that produce no enforcement action. The cost of maintaining two separate households while one parent effectively subsidizes the other’s non-compliance through inaction. The downstream effects on mental health, on career continuity, and on the ability to plan financially for a child’s future.
These are not abstract harms. They are measurable costs imposed by a system that created a legal obligation, failed to uphold it, and offered no remediation.
Research on parental alienation — the sustained pattern of one parent interfering with a child’s relationship with the other — has begun to document these costs in aggregate. Affected parents report higher rates of depression and anxiety. They leave jobs, take on debt, and relocate even for the hope of brief encounters with their children. Children raised in these circumstances show measurable developmental and psychological effects that carry into adulthood.
The labor movement would recognize this pattern immediately: costs externalized onto individuals, borne quietly, with no institutional accountability and no mechanism for recovery.
Who Bears the Weight
The labor movement’s history is also a history of learning who gets left out.
Early labor protections covered some workers and not others. Domestic workers were excluded from the original National Labor Relations Act. Agricultural workers were excluded from overtime protections. The gains were real, but they were not distributed equally — and the gaps were not accidental.
The gaps in family court accountability are also not accidental.
Targeted parents — those whose court-ordered time with their children is systematically denied or disrupted — are not a monolithic group. They are mothers and fathers, high earners and low earners, people with legal representation and people navigating the system alone. What they share is a structural position: they are the party asking the court to do what the court already said it would do, and the court is declining to do so.
The research that exists on who occupies that structural position is incomplete. What the data does suggest is that financial disparity — which parent has more resources to sustain litigation — is a stronger predictor of adverse custody outcomes than almost any other variable. The parent who can afford to keep filing tends to win. The parent who cannot afford to keep filing — and often makes requests for waivers — tends to lose, regardless of what the order says.
That is not a family law problem. That is an access-to-justice problem — the same problem the labor movement faced when workers couldn’t afford to sue over wage theft, and solved by building regulatory infrastructure that didn’t require individual litigation to function.
Family court has not built that infrastructure. Nobody has demanded it loudly enough.
What Accountability Would Look Like
Tomorrow, at rallies across the country, workers will make demands. They will ask for enforceable rights, transparent systems, and institutions that answer to the people they affect.
Those demands are reasonable. They are also incomplete.
An accountability framework for parenting plan enforcement would look something like this: a reporting mechanism for non-compliance that does not require the affected parent to finance new litigation. A documented standard for when a court must act on a contempt petition rather than defer indefinitely. A record-keeping requirement that makes patterns of non-enforcement visible — to appellate courts, to oversight bodies, to the public.
None of this is radical. It is the same logic that produced wage-and-hour law, workplace safety regulation, and every other institutional accountability structure the labor movement won over a century of advocacy.
The eight-hour day took decades. The weekend took longer. Neither came from asking nicely.
I have seen firsthand what it costs a parent to navigate a system that issues orders it will not keep. The labor movement has a word for that: exploitation. The family court system has a word for it, too.
They call it discretion.
This is Part One of a three-part May Day series from Father & Co. examining the intersection of labor rights, parental rights, and institutional accountability. Part Two publishes tomorrow: “Medicaid, Disability, and Custody.” Part Three: “Parental Alienation as Labor Exploitation.”
Sources and background: Research on the economic and psychological burden of parental alienation draws on Baker, A.J.L. & Ben-Ami, N. (2011), “To Turn a Child Against a Parent Is to Turn a Child Against Himself,” Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, 52(7), 472–489 (doi: 10.1080/10502556.2011.609424); and Harman, J.J., Kruk, E., & Hines, D.A. (2018), “Parental Alienating Behaviors: An Unacknowledged Form of Family Violence,” Psychological Bulletin, 144(12), 1275–1299 (doi: 10.1037/bul0000175). Wage-and-hour enforcement infrastructure and complaint procedures are documented by the U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division (dol.gov/agencies/whd). Data on contempt proceeding costs reflects fee survey data published by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. State custody enforcement statutes are cataloged by the National Conference of State Legislatures (ncsl.org). Historical context on the labor movement draws on Philip Dray, There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America (Doubleday, 2010).
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