January 23, 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
Generation Y gets a job
“Flexibility is perhaps also why two-year programs like Teach for America are increasingly popular among Gen Y. Fifty-two Yalies were admitted to TFA last year, and dozens have already been awarded acceptance to the 2009 corps. Corporate America appears to have noticed this, too. Two-year entry-level programs as well as rotational programs are springing up throughout the private sector, at McKinsey and Deloitte as well as at PricewaterhouseCoopers and a smattering of other firms. In fact, Pollak, whose close research of Gen Y has led to several career advice books as well as a regularly updated blog, spends much of her time advising corporate firms about what to expect from and how to attract and retain today’s 20-somethings.”
Retirees Return to Dismal Work Prospects
“Decimated stock holdings and retirement accounts have motivated a new demographic back into the workforce — the able-bodied senior. Seniors recently attended a job fair in Sedona, Ariz. designed especially for them. The atmosphere was one of desperation as most employers offered only low-paying, part-time work.”
10 Best Cities for Job-Seeking Retirees
“As retirement accounts continue to hemorrhage money, many baby boomers are coming to the realization that they'll need to continue working into their traditional retirement years. In fact, a whopping 70 percent of Americans ages 45 to 74 plan to work in retirement—both for enjoyment and because they need the income, according to a recent AARP survey. But jobs aren't easy to come by right now, especially for workers who are middle age or older. In December alone, U.S. employers shed 524,000 jobs. According to a separate AARP survey, 31 percent of employed adults age 45 and older think it's likely that their job will be eliminated in 2009.”
Employers Avoid Axing Oldies but Goodies
“Companies nationwide are laying off workers by the tens of thousands. But many are trying to spare the post-55 set from the ax, a reversal of the top-down trends in past waves of layoffs. They're being driven by legal concerns—since boomers are in a protected age group—and by a need to keep experienced hands in place to keep the companies running and positioned for an upturn. "Seniority matters," says Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, director of the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College. All age groups are being hit by cuts now coursing through Corporate America, but government statistics so far suggest that the burden is falling far more heavily on younger workers. The unemployment rate among workers 55 and over is not only lower than for the younger set, but it has risen less sharply.”
An economic Bill of Rights for Americans
“Now that the free-market conservative era is over, dragged down into oblivion with Wall Street's masters of the universe, liberals and centrists may have a new chance to complete the American social contract by adding some kind of universal health coverage and paid family leave to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But they must be willing to support bold initiatives, not just tiny, incremental reforms like the small tax credits that beaten-down progressives specialized in during the era of Reagan and Gingrich. And liberals should not allow deficit hawks, including Democratic deficit hawks, to intimidate them into thinking small. If the federal government can afford hundreds of billions to bail out Wall Street, it can afford hundreds of billions a year in new spending or forgone tax revenue to provide healthcare for all Americans and paid parental leave for the parents of newborns. Politics is the art of the possible. Any new universal healthcare and family-leave systems will result from compromises. The important thing is to focus on the goal. The healthcare and parental leave programs that complete FDR's economic bill of rights can be designed in various ways, but the social contract as a whole should be defined by a single set of characteristics.”
Work-family balance in the White House
“Americans often endow first families with symbolic cultural significance. In the 1980s, adoring wife Nancy Reagan was seen as representing traditional values. A decade later, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first-ever first lady with a career of her own, became an emblem of the powerful, liberated woman. Today, with all the hopes and dreams many invest in Barack Obama, some of those dreams will inevitably be projected onto his family. No doubt, to many people, just the sight of Barack and Michelle Obama at the inauguration with their two daughters - 10-year-old Malia snapping pictures with her camera and 7-year-old Sasha giving her father a thumbs-up after the oath - was an image of new, forward-looking energy. But the new first family offers other layers of symbolism, too.”
Welcome to Elsewhere
“As I write this piece at home in my Manhattan loft, I'm also elsewhere—leaning across the desk to help my 10-year-old daughter with her online math assignment, shouting at my 9-year-old son to turn down the volume on his Guitar Hero videogame and texting my wife as she shuttles between meetings. I am eager for her to get home, so we can plan our business-travel schedules and the kids' after-school activities for the spring. Then it will be my turn to go out for a meeting with a co-worker. Here but also there, living in a blended world of work and leisure, home and office, I'm one of a new breed of American professional in Obamaland: the Elsewhere Class. This group of white-collar workers is fundamentally different from the midcentury image of the "company man" or "the man in the gray flannel suit," that executive of yesteryear who worked much closer to the production of physical goods, even if he didn't actually get his hands dirty himself. He drank and smoked more, although he also puffed less marijuana and popped fewer antidepressants than today's anxious adults. And, most important, he labored fewer hours, leaving his work behind at the office.”
Why Graduate Students Reject the Fast Track
“We recently completed an unparalleled survey, with more than eight thousand doctoral student respondents across the University of California system, and what we heard is worrisome: major research universities may be losing some of the most talented tenure-track academics before they even arrive. In the eyes of many doctoral students, the academic fast track has a bad reputation—one of unrelenting work hours that allow little or no room for a satisfying family life. If this sentiment is broadly shared among current and future student cohorts, the future life-blood of academia may be at stake, as promising young scholars seek alternative career paths with better work-life balance.”
Blogs
What Gen Y Really Wants - And Why We Should Care
“While conducting research on the work-life balance outlooks of crème de la crème Gen Y-ers (highly educated young people around the world, what we like to call Gen Y-Fi), we asked forty American college students and young professionals what kind of benefits they were looking for from potential employers. By far the most common response was simply "health insurance." When we asked a similar cohort of Gen Y Europeans the same question they came up with a whole score of desirable work-live benefits: flexible working hours, in-house child care facilities, freedom to work from home or a different country even, respect for family life...the list went on. Why were responses from America's college-educated youngsters so uniform and unimaginative, while their European counterparts could shoot off an entire wish-list?”
Michelle Obama's Policy Director: An Advocate for Working Families
“For those wondering what kind of First Lady Michelle Obama will be, her choice as her policy director offers a big clue. Ms. Obama’s naming last Friday of fellow attorney and Harvard Law School classmate Jocelyn Frye, general counsel for one of the nation’s oldest advocacy groups for working women, suggests she’s preparing to take an activist stance on such policy issues as family leave and flexible scheduling. As general counsel for the National Partnership for Women and Families, Ms. Frye has been one of Washington’s most visible advocates of expanding family leave and ending pregnancy discrimination. She’ll bring 15 years of policy-making experience to bear behind Ms. Obama’s stated plans to emphasize work-life issues and aid for military families. Ms. Frye has a reputation as a consensus builder, a front-lines opponent of Bush-era efforts to curtail family leave, and a patient, articulate spokesperson for low- and middle-income families.”
The Four-Day Work Week and the Death of the Flexible Workplace Initiative
“The four-day work week has been hyped as the solution to the search for a flexible workplace. This is nothing more than hype. Truth be told, the four-day workweek is the antithesis of flexibility. The demands for scheduling with employees change from employee to employee and, even with one individual, are subject to change depending on what else is happening in his or her life. The only thing that is static and unchanging in this definition of flexibility is the employee’s request to define their schedule for themselves and to change it as needed.”
Global News
Work life balance a challenge for Canadians
“Canadians are straining more than ever to balance family and work, but a decade of efforts to improve the situation has done little to ease the pressure, a new report finds. From lost productivity to parents getting sick to children's behavioural problems, the issue has potentially far-reaching consequences, according to a recently released study from the Vanier Institute of the Family.”
A reduction of working hours could help reduce unemployment
“However, policy debate has yet to turn to other, equally important, economic remedies. Keynes's emphasis on demand-management policies has rightly been highlighted. But there are other less frequently remarked upon aspects of Keynes' policy proposals. In a letter to the poet TS Eliot in 1945, he suggested that unemployment could be lowered by the reduction in working time. Indeed for Keynes this was the "ultimate solution" to the unemployment problem. Reducing work time not only extended the time during which workers could spend income and hence generate employment, but it also allowed jobs to be spread out more evenly across the available workforce, thereby reducing unemployment. Some rebalancing of work in the UK economy would doubtless bring benefits. The perversity of the present situation is that while many people work very long hours, others languish in unemployment. A readjustment of work time would help to reduce the jobless rate. It would also provide a necessary boost to the quality of work and life for many workers.”