October 17, 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
Life's Basics More of a Stretch
“If money were not so tight, Regino Romero would use the basement of his Lorton town home some other way. But with his former wife gone, his paycheck flat and his bills rising, he sees no option but to rent the place out. The cash -- $400 a month -- helps, but it is not enough. So Romero recently placed an ad in a local newspaper, offering to also rent one of his home's three bedrooms for $350 a month. Bringing tenants into the comfortable home he shares with his three school-age children is a last resort for Romero, who once saw the middle class as tantalizingly within his reach. But with the economy sputtering, inflation increasing to levels not seen in nearly two decades and his family life in flux, he is struggling to survive economically. Although he has worked full time for nearly 14 years as a cook at the Hilton Crystal City hotel, he feeds his own family with help from a local food pantry.”
Back to work . . . as a mom
“The breaking point for Bend mom Shannon Hinderberger came in early September. She had just returned to work after taking three months off for maternity leave for the birth of her son, Ben. The 33-year-old had always been very career-minded and enjoyed her job as marketing coordinator for Bend Memorial Clinic. But heading back to work proved much harder than she expected. On her blog (“No Longer Knocked Up in Bend”) Hinderberger poured out all of her feelings into a post called “What they don’t tell you.” [. . .] Now more than a month later, Hinderberger is feeling a bit better, but still finds juggling the demands of family with work to be a challenge and somewhat overwhelming at times. [. . .] Helping individuals and companies sort out issues surrounding maternity leave is a speciality Ferne Traeger, a psychoanalyst and career consultant in New York. She says many women are blindsided by the challenges.”
Kittery town employees adjust well to 4-day work week
“The Town Hall portion of the Municipal Complex is now closed on Fridays. Town Manager Jon Carter said the redesigned work week is to better serve the public and save money. The new work week is a trial, which will go on for a year. "The transition worked out great. I was really pleased with the transition and getting the notification out to everyone," Place said. "I haven't heard any complaints. The few that I've talked to have kids so it's better that they are home an extra day with their young children." Place said for her personally, it makes things easier, and it is nice having Friday off.”
Telecommuting: Finding balance in work and life
“Casey, who owns ButterFat Writing Services and works part-time for a San Francisco Bay Area technical firm, has been working at home at least part-time for 10 years, and is one in a growing national trend of millions of people doing the same. They’re known as telecommuters, teleworkers or e-workers — the envied few that have flexibility with their work locations and time schedules. In 2006, those who worked at least one day per month at home accounted for 8 percent of the national workforce — or 12.4 million people, according to WorldatWork, an association for human resource professionals that focuses on attracting and retaining employees.”
9 Years of Chronicling the Workplace
“The answer turned out to be somewhere in the middle. The years after Sept. 11 have been marked by a real determination by many workers to dovetail their lives with their work, and a striking accommodation by employers, who have begun to see that flexible workers are at least as productive, if not more so, than those who arrive at the office first and are the last to leave. This march toward flexibility was begun by women — mothers overwhelmed by the demands of a workplace designed in the olden days, when it was assumed that workers would have a spouse taking care of things back home. Some of those women — the ones who were financially able — began to vote against the double load with their feet, leaving the kinds of high-powered jobs that had once been the Holy Grail of the women’s movement.”
Another Casualty from the Crisis: Family Time
“Amid the hits to families' budgets lately, many people are taking an added blow to something they value almost as much: Control over their time. Although most people are feeling too much pain in the pocketbook to talk about it, the economic downturn is forcing many to defer dreams of striking a better work-life balance. As past recessions have shown, downturns tend to quash such luxuries as cutting back to part-time work hours by choice, dropping out voluntarily for a while to stay home with the kids, or taking a sabbatical. Instead, families have to find other ways to sustain closeness.”
3 in 10 state families scrape to get by
“Three in 10 working Georgia families still struggle to get by, according to a report issued Tuesday by a public policy study group. “It used to be that if you worked hard with your muscle and showed up on time you could earn enough” to support a family, said Brandon Roberts, the principal author of the study produced by the Working Poor Families Project. “That’s increasingly no longer the case.” The report counts how many working families are low-income, defined as making less than $41,228 a year. The percentage of Georgia working families the report classified as low-income was also about 30 percent four years ago when the Working Poor Families Project last crunched the numbers.”
Detroit police sued over pregnancy policy
“Five police officers are suing the city, saying they were forced to go on sick leave when their bosses learned they were pregnant, even if they could perform other duties. The officers, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, said they're taking aim at a 2004 policy that prevents them from working unless a doctor finds they can crawl in confined spaces, jump from an elevated surface and forcibly make arrests. [. . .] Officers are forced to "choose between serving the city and having children," the lawsuit says.”
Blogs
A New Legislative Session: Are Work-Family Issues On Your Agenda?
“As the state legislators are busy setting the agenda for the next legislative session, I thought I might share some information about 4 different types of work-family legislative initiatives that I originally compiled in preparation for a keynote talk this summer. While there are numerous types of work-family legislative initiatives considered each year, (check out our bills/statutes database for other types of work-family legislation), for this talk, entitled “9 to 5 No More: State Legislation To Give Working Families More Time,” I chose to focus specifically on: 1. Paid Sick Leave; 2. Education Leave; 3. Flexible Work Schedules; and 4. Teleworking.”
Artist/Mother, an Uneasy Marrriage
“Yet, outside the art world, few people talk about the difficulties that female artists face when rising up in the ranks. As in these other fields, experts say the reason there are fewer women at the top is largely because of the difficulties in establishing or maintaining a careers while also raising children. The new film, “Who Does She Think She Is?,” provides a nuanced look at the sacrifices and challenges facing female artists who become mothers. The stories of the diverse artists profiled in the film mirror those of many professional women — they struggle with periods of not making art; they watch their marriages fail when their commitment to their artistic talent doesn’t mesh with a partner’s vision of a wife; they do work they don’t really want to do to stay afloat financially.”
Work Life: Moving From the Personal to the Political
“I am glad that the 2008 election has raised the issue of working families. This has been a "sleeper" issue, but no more! After the nomination of Sarah Palin, working families are responding in such high numbers that they are jamming the airwaves, filling up blogs, even crashing websites as they make their varying opinions heard! But so far, what people are saying is mainly personal -- can Sarah Palin manage her large family and be Vice President? How did Joe Biden care for his two young sons alone and continue to be an effective Senator? And on and on. It is not surprising that we focus on the personal. In the media leading up to the presidential nominations and at the conventions, the introductions to the candidates have included how they manage their own personal and political lives. We are left with images of Barack Obama talking to his daughters by Webcam at night, of John McCain asking his wife where the child she brought home from Bangladesh was going to live, of Joe Biden taking the train home to Wilmington after his days in the Senate, and of Sarah Palin with her children in her office.”
Work Life policy is election 2008's pink elephant
“It'll be there in the middle of the debate hall Wednesday night at Hofstra University, at the third and final presidential debate. It's really big, and really pink and has everything to do with the economy. But we're not likely to hear much about Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's work life policies. While the audience might be thinking about their work life juggle; how they are going to keep their jobs, let alone attend to their families, work life issues are generally just given a bit of lip service under the formal platform of the economy.”
Global News
Getting to know your working style
“WORK-life balance can be a difficult thing to achieve in the current economic climate. However, according to Emmet Wrafter, human-resource (HR) manager with Abbott Laboratories Ireland, it is possible and, in the long run, could make you more effective as an employee. Wrafter recently completed a ‘life-navigation’ course, developed by Camilla Kring, founder of the B-society. Put simply, the B-society represents a different kind of workforce — those people who prefer to take time waking up in the morning, but will work late into the evening. Already, the society has helped bring about a lot of change in the corporate world and, increasingly, companies are allowing staff more flexibility.”
Mompreneurs giving birth to new trend
“One year after giving birth to her daughter Peyton, Robyn Feldberg's clothing business was born. Named after Feldberg's son Hudson, Huddy Buddy sells adorable shirts for children and onesies for babies. Looking after toddlers and launching a new business at the same time is not for the faint of heart. But it's a challenge more and more Canadian women are signing up for. Mompreneurs – mothers who are also entrepreneurs – are on the rise in Canada. For evidence, check out the trade shows, websites, mompreneur of the year award and magazine devoted to them.”
Flexible working: taking control of the office and life
“Monica Burch and Jane Hollinshead are a rare breed: senior partners at a big City law firm. On top of that, they both work flexibly, fitting busy practices into hours to suit them and their families. At Addleshaw Goddard, a pioneer of flexible working, such arrangements are not unusual. But throughout corporate law firms, flexible or “smarter” working — if on the rise — is not very visible and the macho long-hours “jacket-on-the-back-of-the-chair” culture of “presentee-ism” prevails. This week a report, Legal Lives, was published after research by the charity, Working Families, on the barriers in law firms to a better work-life balance.”