November 25, 2008.
The Workplace Flexibility 2010 News Roundup is a compilation of the latest news articles, reports and other materials related to workplace flexibility. The News Roundup appears twice-weekly. If you have questions about any of the items, please contact WF2010@law.georgetown.edu.
Articles
Big city family moves to North Dakota and loves it
“Friendly bets have made by locals to see how long they last. It's been a year, and the Threadgolds are entering their second winter. [. . .] The Threadgolds have three dogs, 19 cats and plenty of solitude. A freshly killed deer hangs in a tree next to their new single-story home, which they built on five acres of a former soybean field. The couple paid only a few thousand dollars for the land, and say their mortgage has been slashed by two-thirds compared with what they were paying in California. [. . .] Satellite Internet service allows Threadgold to send his designs to El Segundo, Calif.-based Mattel, or directly to China, where the toys are made and the packaging printed. Threadgold said the result is the same whether he sends the artwork from a cubicle in California or from his studio at his home in Goodrich, a town of about 160 people near the geographical center of North Dakota.”
Two Other Cities' Experiences with Mandatory Paid Sick Days
“Early this month, Milwaukee voters approved a referendum concerning paid sick days. It requires the city to pass a law, mandating all employers to provide workers with paid sick time. For small companies, it would be five days a year; for larger firms, nine days. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce announced it’s filing a lawsuit to stop the law from being implemented. The MMAC is holding a conference to gather support for its case. WUWM’s LaToya Dennis spoke with officials in the two other American cities that passed similar ordinances.”
Explaining Work From Home to Colleagues
“Clearly, not everyone in a company buys into the flexible work arrangement you've created with your boss. The truth is, though, your opportunity to work from home is not really relevant in this particular conversation. "The best thing to do [in this situation] is to keep your response as solution-oriented as possible," says Ms. Barbara E. Mohl, president of HRConnected, a human resources consulting firm. You could just say that the scheduled time doesn't work for you and give two alternative dates—perhaps the day before or day after the originally suggested time-- that work better. But with that said, it's important to realize that when you have the perk to work from home one day a week you need to be able to extend the same flexibility back to your company. "It is important to consider making periodic accommodations for professional requests for meetings, if possible, to underscore that you are very much professionally engaged in the company and on the team," says Ms. Mara Covell, a managing director at the executive search firm, Howard-Sloan-Koller Group.”
Economic woes send St. Louis workers in search of "encore" careers
“Corinne Richardson's epiphany about her life came 10 years ago, staring into a silver shrimp bowl. "I wondered why I was going to spend one more minute polishing a bowl that I'd gotten as a wedding present and have never used," Richardson said. With a few steps in between, Richardson quit her job as a juvenile lawyer at St. Louis County Circuit Court and started a new career as an "unclutter your life" specialist.”
Bolster military families
“Michelle Obama has yet to move into the White House, but she has already begun to do our country a great service by beginning a critical national conversation about the struggles of many military families. Thanks to intense media coverage, the public knows about the very serious health problems of returning war veterans and the difficulties they face returning to the work force. But the public is far less aware of the everyday difficulties that confront so many military families - whether their service members go to war or not. The military services now include many more members with children than during the Vietnam era. Today, about 1.8 million children are growing up in military families, and as many as 700,000 U.S. children have at least one parent deployed overseas.”
National Family Week
“During National Family Week, we reflect on the important values and character that families instill in their children and in our society. Families offer a stable and nurturing environment for children by providing support and comfort. A child's parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other family members show them love and teach them right from wrong. Strong families set a positive example and help young people grow into compassionate and responsible citizens.”
Take time to be Dad
“I learned my latest parenting lesson by falling down. Actually, it was more of a swan dive. While squeezing in a run during my recent paternity leave, I tripped, went airborne and had my 163 pounds crush my left kneecap into the sidewalk. As my blood and grunts stopped passing traffic, one thought ran through my mind: There's no way I can be hurt. My wife was recovering from a Caesarean section a few days earlier. My preschooler and kindergartener had a new baby brother -- and a laid-up mother. And my lovable but mildly unbalanced dog was falling between the cracks.”
Blogs
Balance is a Myth for Executive Women
“In the technology industry, with few women in the executive ranks and fewer still in the board room, we live in a world where balance is a myth. We talk about balance but the reality is that women in the corporate world are competing with men most of the time, appropriately competing on skill and hard work, but up against significant gender stereotypes and so we have to work harder and smarter to get ahead. Balance is hard for most working women -- but it is particularly elusive for women wanting to be a senior exec, be in the board room, run a billion dollar division or be a CEO.”
Laid Off From My Non-Job
“Earlier this month I learned that The Times had decided to discontinue this blog. Suddenly, so many of the things I report and write about have been thrown right onto my own doorstep. When I started Shifting Careers as a column in May 2007, one of the things I wanted to explore was the fluid relationship between employment and entrepreneurship. Increasingly, people are building careers that mix up periods of working for themselves with periods of working for others. And like me, many of the self-employed create situations that involve affiliations — like what I have with The Times — that marry elements of both employment and free agency. So I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that when those situations end, it feels in some ways like the loss of a big client and in others like a layoff.”
Although Shifting Careers has been discontinued, the New York Times publishes two other blogs relevant to work-life balance:
Domestic Disturbances, by Judith Warner
Motherlode, by Lisa Belkin
Jostling Colleagues for Vacation Time
“Workplaces around the country are lightly attended this week as families enjoy some time off ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. But they’d be even emptier if everyone had gotten the vacation time they were after. The Juggle wrote back in June about vacation-time conflicts with work colleagues. But as the economic crisis has worsened and the pace of buyouts, layoffs and closings has quickened, offices have become more short-staffed than usual. That means getting time off for the holidays has become even more of a challenge for juggling employees.”
Frozen Eggs Oocyte cryopreservation is not the secret to professional success in academe
“Last spring I gave a talk on balancing work and family to a class of M.B.A. students at my university. In the discussion afterward, a young woman volunteered, "I'm planning to freeze my eggs — it's very expensive and the procedure I hear is painful, but I don't see how I can plan a family until my career is going well." [. . .] This freezing procedure is experimental, costly, and fraught with medical pitfalls. In October 2007 the Practice Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine released an opinion saying that "oocyte cryopreservation, or egg freezing, ... should not be offered or marketed as a means to defer reproductive aging." Many questions remain about the procedure, including the healthy development of babies born from such eggs.”
Global News
The search for work-life balance goes offshore
“The most famous Christmas truce was in 1914, when British and German soldiers climbed from their trenches and wandered into no-man’s land to talk, bury their dead and play football. In the Philippines, Christmas sees a fraught game, as the government and the communist New People’s Army declare a wary and often disputed truce. Last week, Australia declared its own Christmas truce, saying most of its warships would return to port for two months. Actually, this was not a truce. It was a way of improving sailors’ work-life balance – not a phrase heard much during the first world war, or any conflict.”
Irish among best Euro multi-taskers
“The multi-tasking Irish are among the best in the EU at juggling work and home commitments, a survey has found. The research revealed that after the Finns and the Dutch, citizens in Ireland find it easiest to maintain a work-life balance. At the other end of the scale, only one in five Hungarians find it easy to combine office and household duties.”
Nurses seek 26 weeks' parental leave
“NURSES are calling for the Federal Government's proposed paid parental leave scheme to be extended from 18 to 26 weeks to secure Australia's struggling health care system. Addressing a Productivity Commission hearing into the proposed taxpayer-funded scheme, Australian Nursing Federation (ANF) secretary Ged Kearney said the health sector was struggling because of a lack of nurses. But increasing the amount of paid leave to 26 weeks and spreading the funding responsibility between government and employers would help retention and recruitment rates, Ms Kearney said.”