What's New Archive

May 11, 2009 –

On Wednesday, June 24, the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor hosted a teleconference on “Workplace Flexibility News: Flexibility for Hourly Workers, Public Policy Update and More.” Part of the “Free Flex-Options” series, the teleconference featured remarks by WF2010 Legislative Counsel Liz Watson. Ms. Watson discussed various strategies for developing Flexible Work Arrangements that respond to the needs of employers and employees. John Wilcox, Deputy Director of Corporate Voices for Working Families, discussed the findings of a recent study by Corporate Voices’ on the benefits of flexibility for hourly workers.

For more, please visit: http://www.dol.gov/wb/flex.htm.

On Wednesday, May 20, Workplace Flexibility 2010 hosted a briefing with the New America Foundation and the American Psychological Association on workplace flexibility and mental health. To watch a webcast of the event, please click here.

On Wednesday, May 13, Workplace Flexibility 2010 released a comprehensive set of policy solutions to expand Americans’ access to flexible work arrangements such as compressed workweeks, predictable schedules, and telecommuting.

To read the report, click here.

March 18, 2009 –

Since the election of President Obama, issues pertaining to workplace flexibility have achieved some prominence in Washington. In the first months of his presidency, Obama established both the Middle Class Task Force and the Council on Women and Girls, assigning them each the project of exploring how workplace policy can be adjusted to ease the strenuous juggling act of working men and women. As policy makers embark on this task they will have resource to a newly published and timely book by Urban Institute Press, titled: Work-Life Policy.

Edited by Anne C. Crouter and Alan Booth, the volume compiles the research and insight of the leading scholars in the work-life field into seventeen chapters that cover four principal areas of study ranging from the influence of a flexible workplace on health and well being to the importance of workplace flexibility for hourly employees to the political salience of work-life issues.

Chai Feldblum – Co-Director of Workplace Flexibility 2010 and Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center – contributed “Policy Challenges and Opportunities for Workplace Flexibility: The State of Play.” The National Advisory Commission on Workplace Flexibility is well represented in the book with chapters by Netsy Firestein, Ellen Galinsky, Shelley Wadsworth MacDermid and Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes.

To visit the book’s website, click here.

February 6, 2009 –

On Friday, January 30, President Barack Obama called a press conference to announce the creation of the Middle Class Working Families Task Force. Under the direction of Vice President Joe Biden, the task force will explore the various obstacles to economic and employment security for working families, including a workplace structure that affords insufficient flexibility to those who must balance the oft-competing demands of work and family. For more about the position of work-family issues in the new Congress, read a feature of Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who is behind a number of legislative efforts to expand workplace flexibility. Also, the House Committee on Education and Labor held a hearing on Tuesday, March 3, titled: "Encouraging Family-Friendly Workplace Policies." For more about the hearing, click here.

To visit the website of the Task Force, click here.

To read Vice President Biden’s editorial on the purpose of the Task Force, click here.

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