June 26, 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
Rapid City Regional reinstates paid personal leave
“Regional Health Systems' financial reports in May gave administrators enough good news to reinstate the accrual of paid personal leave for its employees, a company spokesman said Thursday. Employees got the news that the four-month freeze had been lifted in a June 24 memo from Dr. Charles Hart, chief executive of Regional Health. In mid-March, Regional's employees stopped accruing paid personal leave hours in a cost-saving measure for the cash-strapped health system.”
Top-Paying Jobs For Women
“Women are flocking to the labor force in record numbers. Nearly 60% sought or occupied employment in 2008, the latest year for which statistics are available, representing 46.5% of the total U.S. labor force. More than one-third of these women worked in management, professional and related occupations, accounting for 51% of all workers in this top-paying sector. Though a pay gap persists--women's earnings remain stalled at around 80% of men's--women are finding the jobs that pay them the most, and some may surprise you. Based on a U.S. Department of Labor Women's Bureau 2008 analysis, we ranked women's median weekly earnings as full-time wage and salary workers to uncover the highest-paying jobs for women.”
How to Enlist a Global Work Force of Freelancers
“Small businesses increasingly are tapping a new talent pool: the world. A new generation of online service marketplaces is giving small companies more opportunities than ever to find specialized expertise and affordable labor. Main Street businesses can shop a virtual international bazaar of freelancers to recruit computer programmers in Russia, graphic designers in San Francisco or data analysts in India.”
Some fathers find staying home is a full-time job
“Bobby Smith has worked 16-hour days for two and a half years and isn't even tired. Smith is a full-time father, staying home during the day with his two sons, 2-year-old Xavier and 8-month-old Owen, while his wife heads to the office. When the couple found out they were expecting, it was a combination of Smith's natural patience and his wife's higher salary that made the Gaithersburg man leave his managerial position at Trader Joe's for managing the house, and he hasn't looked back.”
Paid Sick Days, a Luxury in the U.S.
“Most parents in the United States have to work. To be more precise, only three out of 10 children have a stay-at-home parent. But as the recent H1N1 flu outbreak underscored, this can have serious public health implications since many of those working parents simply do not have the right to stay home with a sick child. ‘Twenty-two million working women don’t have a single paid sick day. That means they lose money any time they have to stay home to take care of their kids,’ First Lady Michelle Obama said in a speech on May 7, at the eighth annual meeting of Corporate Voices for Working Families.”
Blogs
Jumping back on the ladder: talking with Harvard's Christine Heenan
“Christine Heenan, who spent her twenties in the Clinton White House and later, time with little kids running her own small business, notes that even after jumping off the corporate ladder, ‘You can absolutely come out on top. I had a period of time I thought, I'll never be back in those circles...’ She's now back in a demanding new leadership role at a global institution, a role that requires the whole family's cooperation, but ‘After a decade of really balancing work with my kids, we approach this new challenge as a team. I couldn't have considered this career move if I hadn't taken that time to be with my kids more 'til now.’”
The Challenges (and Rewards) of Part-Time Work
“To work or not to work…many new moms grapple with that issue. Some moms decide to stay home for months or years, if it is economically feasible. Others continue to work full-time. Still others decide to reduce their hours to part-time, and remain on their career path, although possibly on a slower schedule. But while working moms may fear that working part-time will create yet another glass ceiling, many part-timers are finding that they are actually advancing in their careers. Working as a part-time professional is becoming an increasingly acceptable work alternative. Companies nationwide are offering employees the option of working part-time.”
Is It Possible to Change Corporate Culture to Accept Workplace Flex?
“I came across this article from Harvard Business on changing corporate culture thanks to Dr. David Ballard. I was taken by much of what it says…the peer pressure angle, the change your story approach but also by the fact that this particular change came from the top down. What if you’re trying to change not one corporate culture but many? And what if the change is not necessarily something that those in management are interested in, but instead it is the workforce that embraces it? And how do you get that diverse workforce (men, women, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y) all to change their story?”
Gen Y, parenting, and asking the right questions
“The interviews that I’ve done with Gen Y:ers have shown that young men and women shy away from labels like stay-at-home-mom or stay-at-home-dad. In their long-term plans, they mention wanting to take some time off (several months to a year or so) when they have children, but they would never want to call themselves a stay-at-home parent. They want to continue to identify themselves as professionals, throughout their time off. That is, I think, an important distinction. And it points to a crucial issue, which Smith also wrestles with. The Unites States offers fewer provisions to help working families than any other industrial nation in the world. Because there is no federally mandated paid parental leave in America, as little as one year out of the workforce to care for kids makes you a stay-at-home parent. The equivalent time out in most European countries allows you to remain a ‘professional’ on temporary leave.”
Recession Woes: The Loss of Maternity Leave
“As we've discussed before, I was one of the lucky ones. My office granted me six months maternity leave, per my request. [. . .] So, when I read articles like this one at ABC News about moms who have to cut back on their maternity leave because of the recession, I feel for the moms who want more but can't risk it. Six weeks -- the amount of time most doctors declare a woman disabled after giving birth naturally and about the average length of time most women take off -- is such a short amount of time when your life has made such a dramatic shift.”
Do We Really Need Public Policies To Encourage Flexible Work?
“It will take a combination of ‘sticks’ and ‘carrots’ to achieve the desired results — workplaces that are more productive because they place the emphasis on achieving results rather than on where and when the work is done and citizens who can navigate their complex lives successfully.”
Telecommuting: Is It The Answer To A Part-Time Freelancer's Juggle?
“If you have been freelancing on the side while working another full-time job, you probably know the juggle I’m referring to all too well. It’s tough to manage two jobs, especially when you’re working all day at your primary job, and focusing on your freelance work at night, weekends and holidays. If you’ve been doing this long enough, you may be thinking about eventually taking the plunge and going off on your own. But, it’s a Catch-22. You know that you need to be able to beef up your freelance workload and dedicate more time to your clients to make it realistic, but there are only so many hours in the day and so much we can do on limited sleep. Or, maybe you enjoy working at your other job and are not in any big hurry to jump ship. So what’s the solution?”
The Economist Gets the Arithmetic of Shorter Work Time Wrong
“The Economist warned readers of the error of trying to reduce unemployment by cutting work hours or other such methods, referring to the "lump of labor" fallacy -- the idea that there is a fix demand for labor to be spread around. While the Economist has an arguable case in normal times, it does not have an arguable case in a prolonged period of high unemployment like the current situation. In the current situation, the notion of a fixed demand for labor (absent some exogenous stimulus) is very much on the mark. We can have 100 million people 40 hours a week or we can have 111 million working 36 hours. Of course, the world is a bit more complicated than this, but the basic arithmetic does hold.”
Global News
Work-life approach encourages women to come back
“COMPARED to the rest of the legal profession, Fiona King is a rarity. She is one of just 32 women in the current intake of 118 partners. She is also about to take almost a year of maternity leave and plans to work part time when she eventually returns to work at insurance law specialist Moray & Agnew. In the wider profession, that might seem novel. But not at this firm. When Ms King returns from maternity leave she will be part of a practice group where two other women partners both work three days a week -- and have done so for years. But there's more: while half of the 32 firms surveyed by The Australian appointed no new female partners, Ms King is one of four women in her firm's intake of five new partners.”
Flexible friends
“In dark economic times, it's not uncommon to look fervently among the gloom for ‘silver linings’. According to Helen Wilkinson the CBI's half yearly survey report is just that. Employers, it would seem, are resorting to innovative methods to keep hold of their staff in spite of recession, and this could signal a radical shift in the way we do business in the long term. Newfound flexibility and enhanced co-operation between employers and employees is being hailed as a ‘positive consequence of the recession’. Yet we need to ensure that employers aren't declaring the dawn of a new age in working practices in one breath but only applying these ‘new rules’ to a very narrow audience – namely working parents.”
The end of retirement
“WHEN Otto von Bismarck introduced the first pension for workers over 70 in 1889, the life expectancy of a Prussian was 45. In 1908, when Lloyd George bullied through a payment of five shillings a week for poor men who had reached 70, Britons, especially poor ones, were lucky to survive much past 50. By 1935, when America set up its Social Security system, the official pension age was 65—three years beyond the lifespan of the typical American. State-sponsored retirement was designed to be a brief sunset to life, for a few hardy souls.”