February 24, 2009 .
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
What to Do When You're About to Take a Leave
“If you're awaiting the arrival of a new family member, preparing for maternity or paternity leave is probably a top priority. Advance planning is critical for safeguarding your reputation among your peers. "This is also a big transition for the people who work with you," says Cali Williams Yost, president and founder of Work+Life Fit Inc., a corporate-flexibility consultancy in Madison, N.J. Here's how to prepare for your leave. Mark your calendar. Give yourself a deadline -- ideally one month prior to your leave date -- to finish making preparations and wrap up current assignments, says Barbara Ashby, manager of the WorkLife group at the University of California-Davis. If you need to take on any new projects that might infringe upon your deadline, make sure a colleague is able to pick up where you leave off, she adds.”
Michelle Obama takes well-trod path in first lady role
Still, as they contemplate the first lady's political and policy role, she and her staff are doing so from the safety of the well-trod path. ‘You have this undefined role of first lady," said Jackie Norris, a campaign aide who is now Obama's chief of staff. "She wants to think about how to be the hostess, but are there other things she can do to help the dialogue?’ It's not just that Obama has the Hillary Clinton example to learn from. She's from a generation informed by the lessons of Clinton and her contemporaries, and part of a wave of working women who more often insist on having fulfilling lives at home too. That assumption is implicit in the "work-life balance" message Michelle Obama espouses so often. And it's evident in how she is making her way in Washington so far, working outward from her White House quarters in concentric circles.”
Ex-senior center manager understands the crisis
“Haile, who lives in the Richmond District, is among the 61 percent of San Franciscans 65 and older who are economically insecure - a number higher than in any other California county, according to a report released today by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, an Oakland-based research and advocacy group. Almost half of all seniors in California - 1.8 million - struggle to cover the basic costs of housing, food, transportation and medical care, the study found. And 65,000 of them are in San Francisco. [. . .] Although seniors aren't the only ones struggling financially these days, the impending retirement of the nation's Baby Boomers gives the elderly affordability crunch an extra urgency: While 1 in 10 Californians was 65 or over in 2000, by 2030, 18 percent of state residents - 6.5 million people - are expected to be elderly.”
Elderly Emerge as a New Class of Workers - and the Jobless
“Even when the economy is humming along, older workers who get laid off tend to spend more time unemployed. In December, the average period for joblessness for workers older than 55 was 25 weeks, compared with 18.7 weeks for those under 55, according to the AARP Public Policy Institute. The physical limitations of some older workers likely account for part of the difference. But Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, director of the Sloan Center on Aging and Work at Boston College, cites lingering stereotypes that older workers are more expensive, less productive and resistant to change. Today's sputtering economy has flooded the labor market with a multitude of younger workers looking for jobs, which has made it even harder for older ones.”
Smoothing the Way to Self-Employment
“In fact, each month from 2002 through 2007, just under 300 of every 100,000 adults in the United States started a business, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. When the economy is strong, people may try self-employment because the opportunities seem plentiful and financing is easy to get. And in harder times like these, it can seem a tempting option for people who have just been laid off — or are watching as colleagues all around them lose their jobs. But mystique aside, is self-employment always an attractive option? Working for yourself offers distinct advantages, and they go beyond the ability to wear slippers to work. (Who, me?) You can say goodbye to that usually pointless 10 a.m. sales meeting, for example. Your schedule is often your own.”
Paid family leave? Let's give it a deserved rest
“While granting paid leave for important life events sounds like a nice idea, it's odd to charge all employees -- regardless of their means or income -- so other employees can take several weeks off work. Even though the program's proposed cost isn't outrageous at $42 a year for a full-time worker, there are better ways to spend $42 than offering paid leave to people who might not need it. (There's also no reason to think this program's cost wouldn't grow over time.) Salary and family income wouldn't determine who receives the paid-leave benefit and who doesn't, which means the state could be taxing a low-income fast-food worker to pay a higher income attorney $300 a week to be home with her new baby. That doesn't make any sense and is the first of many reasons to write your legislators and urge them to resist this feel-good legislation when it comes up.”
Joblessness takes a toll on the soul
“She found that the trauma of the experience could be long-lasting, for both the men and their loved ones. "The men who found new jobs eventually recovered their self-esteem, but it never got back to the point of men who had not lost their jobs," Braginsky said. At the same time, she saw cynicism and distrust rise among those who'd been laid off. These feelings affected relationships with spouses and were passed on to children. That dynamic, Braginsky predicted, will play out again in the current downturn, resulting in a generation of young people who will approach jobs and relationships with a sense of wariness instilled early on.”
Nice Work If You Can Get It
“In times as grim as these, stable wages and higher productivity seem like good things. But they come at a price. The reason that companies have remained so productive despite the slowdown has a lot to do with one of the most celebrated efficiency gains of recent years: the so-called just-in-time economy. In past recessions, companies often delayed firing people, because, in their uncertainty over the precise state of their business, they preferred to keep people around rather than go to the trouble of firing them and having to hire replacements later. In economist-speak, companies “hoarded labor.” But during the past two decades companies have got significantly better at responding quickly to changes in the marketplace. Retailers carry less inventory; manufacturers have shorter lead times on production. This made the system as a whole more efficient, and each individual worker more productive. But it has also made redundant workers more expendable, and labor hoarding a thing of the past.”
Blogs
Ask the Juggle: Bringing Your Child To Work
“The mom in me wants to say, just do it. Any working parent knows what it’s like when there’s a collision between the irresistible force – your child – and the immovable object – your workday. If you have to go to work and there’s no care available, you take your child to work. I’ve done it, and it never worked out very well. In one case, my baby refused to nap in her infant seat as expected, and wound up distracting several co-workers. But I got a few needed calls and other tasks done. However, career coaches I asked for advice on the question say no. Children and work usually don’t mix very well, they advise. And unless you’ve cleared it with your boss in advance, bringing a child to work for more than a few minutes risks annoying co-workers, creating distractions and making it hard for anyone to get much done. A better idea, the coach says, is to lay emergency back-up plans in advance, with at least two alternatives to fall back upon on short notice.”
George W. Bush does Dallas, decides against becoming hardware-store greeter
“True, Kyle Walters, president and CEO of Elliott's, had offered Bush a job as the store's greeter. "Like you, many of our greeters are retired from the corporate world, so we're sure you'll have no trouble making new friends," Walters said in an open letter to Bush in a newspaper ad, offering him a cut rate on items purchased for Laura Bush's "honey-do" list. The Bushes moved into a home in a wealthy part of Dallas on Friday. The former first lady is working on a book, but the former president has yet to interest a publisher in his memoirs. In fact, several have advised him to wait a few years until his reputation is less, well, in need of a good hardware polishing.”
Should Gen Y Abandon Any Hope for Work-Life Balance
“Will work-life balance survive the current economy? Or will employees abandon the idea in an attempt to protect themselves from layoffs and other job cuts? In a recent post, Adria B. Martinelli recently asked whether work-life balance issues are at risk in the current economy. And she's not alone. The ABA Journal recently reported that associates have dumped the idea of a "work-life balance" and are, instead, billing hours like crazy in an attempt to survive any upcoming cutbacks.”
How the recession is affecting family relationships
“Recession means worry—all too tangible worry, like making mortgage payments. And the intangible but no less consuming fear of how unemployment is affecting your laid-off wife or girlfriend—or, more often, husband or boyfriend. The data showing that men have experienced 82 percent of the recession's job losses suggest that we're in a moment of uninvited cultural shift. The dislocation of the contracting workplace is tangled up with the dislocation of changing gender roles. For feminists, the prospect of more women as breadwinners, and more men at home, is "a thought to file under 'let's try to find a silver lining,' " as Lisa Belkin put it in her blog for the New York Times. As of last year, about 25 percent of wives out-earned their husbands. What if the recession pushes that number up to one-third of marriages, or more? How high would the number have to go before we stopped seeing these couples as worth remarking on? And if laid-off dads turn into stay-at-home dads who do the afterschool pickups and get dinner started, won't gender roles become more fluid for everyone?”
Global News
Mother of all battles for life balance
“Shirley Conran, the high-wire queen of the work-life balance, has called on working women to fight their way out of the recession with grit, guts and guerrilla tactics. After 30 years of championing a woman’s right to have it all, Conran fears that, if women aren’t careful, the economic downturn will drive them away from the top jobs. “I think we’re slipping backwards,” she told The Sunday Times. “There are still only 12% of women on the top 100 FTSE boards and the gender pay gap is getting wider.” Conran, whose books Superwoman and Down with Superwoman promoted the idea of women combining motherhood with fulfilling careers before the term “work-life balance” was a scrawl on a flipchart, has been a formidable force in workplace politics for decades. She founded the charity Mothers in Management in 1998, founded the Work Life Balance Trust in 2001, which she set up to raise the profile of flexible, family friendly working, served as a government adviser to the Department for Education and Employment from 2000 to 2002, and was awarded the OBE for services to equality in 2004.”
Give up the doomed attempt to balance work and life
“In grumpy middle-age I am coming round to the view that much of the debate on work-life balance has been misguided. If people hate their jobs I can understand why they might want to spend as little time doing them as possible. If work is physically or mentally exhausting there is a limit on how much of it you can do. This is an easy thing for a "knowledge worker" who likes his work to say. But the biggest tensions seem to arise after the insertion of that dividing line between the words work and life. The search for an elusive balance between the two can be as tiring as work itself. Work is life, as the late Studs Terkel said. We should rub out that firm black line that separates our lives and our careers. It creates a false choice, an either/or situation that can rarely be successfully resolved. Is this a sure-fire recipe for workaholism? I hope not. I like spending time with my family, too.”
Family policies 'dad-proofed' to give fathers bigger role - but no extra paternity leave
“Ministers have ordered Whitehall to "dad-proof" its family policies, amid concerns that schools, hospitals and other services are preventing fathers from taking a more active role in their children's lives. Civil servants have been asked to make sure the government is targeting its parenting initiatives at fathers as well as mothers to break the current "mother-domination" of family policy. Plans already under way include an order to schools to send children's reports to their absent fathers as well as their home addresses, and moves to encourage maternity wards to let fathers spend their child's first night at the hospital instead of being sent home alone. Campaigners for fatherhood welcomed the plans but were unhappy that the government was still refusing to improve paid paternity leave beyond the current two weeks.”