It is our hope that this new brief and our previous 19 briefs are helpful resources that provide you with objective, high quality policy information on current work-family issues.   Highlights of our policy brief collection include briefs on flexible work schedules, military families, paid family leave, paid sick days, part-time work, and telework.

And, if there is a work-family topic in which you are interested that we have not yet addressed over the past four years of providing work-family policy briefs, please let us know!  We are here as a resource for you.

During this transition phase, we want input from you! This is an opportunity for our users to participate in the creation of the next generation of the Network. Here’s how you can get involved:

1. Please complete the online survey that we will be conducting in early December. We will notify you via email when the survey is available and the link will also be available on our new Transition Page. Tell us your ideas about revenue producing activities, recommendations on how to manage our transition to self-sufficiency, and thoughts about how the Sloan Network can become more valuable to our audiences.
2. Distribute the link to the survey to any colleagues or organizations that are invested in the future of the Network and encourage them to give us their ideas.
3. Share your comments and thoughts about the transition.  You can use the comments box below.
4. Visit our new Transition Page for updated information about our activities and progress.

The Network has evolved into the premier online destination for work and family information. Visits to the site have tripled to over 300,000 this past year, and just last week, we hit a weekly all time high of 11,000 visits! This transition to self-sufficiency provides an exciting opportunity to build on our past successes.

We need your help to continue to provide the one-stop shopping for high-quality resources that you’ve come to rely on for your work. I hope that we can count on your support, and we welcome your feedback!

On October 29th, I represented the Families and Work Institute at the Career Relaunch Forum at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. I am a relauncher myself, having returned to work after a 14 year hiatus raising my children and organizing community programs, so the Forum was of particular interest to me. I wish these services had been available 11 years ago when I began my search to return to the workplace!

With more men than women having lost their jobs in the recession and with the increasing alignment of attitudes and behavior between young men and women concerning child care, ambition, and home chores (see the Families and Work Institute publications Times are Changing: Gender and Generation at Work and at Home and The Impact of the Recession on Employers), women who have taken career breaks are needing or wanting to return to work.

The Career Relaunch Forum was a one-day return to work conference educating mid-career professionals on career break about the return to work process, and bringing them together with employers interested in meeting them. The goal of the Forum was to educate the participants on the realities of their re-entry to the workforce and to give them confidence on the opportunities in front of them.

I moderated the panel entitled Employers Discuss How Relaunchers Should Approach Today’s Job Market with Allison O’Kelly, CEO of Mom Corps (specializing in the “flexible” exployment market); Trish Pescatore, US Recruiting Director for Accenture; Priya Trauber, Director of Diversity for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and Elana Weinstein, Learning and Development Professional with Bloomberg, Inc.

Issues addressed by the panelists included:

• What the job market is going to be like in their industry over the next 12-18 months;
• What the driving forces for company diversity initiatives are and how the economy will affect those efforts;
• Opportunities available at each company that are especially suitable for relaunchers; and
• The panelists’ advice on the two or three things relaunchers must do and on mistakes they should avoid.

Participants were high-caliber professionals with significant experience prior to leaving the traditional workplace. One hundred percent of participants had an undergraduate degree and approximately 80% had graduate degrees. More than half of the participants are looking to return to the workforce or make their transition within the next six months. Their backgrounds are varied with the majority in the following categories: financial services, management consulting, consumer products, advertising, or PR.

The Forum is designed to offer guidance on defining next career stages; help participants determine skills, training and knowledge necessary to re-enter; learn more about how the workplace has changed since they left; and facilitate networking with peers and potential employers. Interestingly, 10% of the participants were men.

The participants heard some heartening stories about successful relaunches including that of a woman who had been out of the traditional workplace for 21 years and was now rising in the ranks at Goldman Sachs. Allison O’Kelley emphasized the importance of looking at small and medium sized companies if you are searching for flexible work options, as they are more likely to offer them. Priya Trauber said that Morgan Stanley Smith Barney was eager to train relaunchers to enter their sales force, but that relaunchers shouldn’t initially expect to work part-time in corporate settings. Bentley University and MIT offer educational programs for would-be relaunchers. The group brain-storming sessions on skill-based future work options were very effective and gave participants and injection of optimism and new ideas.

Fox News broadcast from the event and Examiner.com ran a story by Amy Impellizzeri on the Relaunch Forum.

Co-founders of iRelaunch, Carol Fishman Cohen and Vivian Steir Rabin, introduced participants to The 7 Steps to Relaunch Success, Dr. Pamela Stone from Hunter College moderated a panel of successful relaunchers who told their stories and the afternoon breakout sessions covered “Assessing Your Career Options, and “Networking and Marketing Yourself.”

For more information on future iRelaunch events and Carol and Vivian’s book Back on the Career Track, you can go to www.irelaunch.com. And if you are a relauncher and are interested in sharing your story, please comment below.

Who’s Who in Work and Family

• Berit P. Brandth
• Adrienne Burgess
• Andrea Doucet
• Richard J. Fletcher
• Jane Millar
• Margaret O’Brien
• Eberhard Schaefer
• Jennifer A. Schmidt

New, free work-family content online:

• HBS Working Knowledge: Clusters of Entrepreneurship
• Center for American Progress: Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences
• ResourceShelf: Google Launches Flu Shot Locator Lookup Database
• Harvard Business School: Policy Bundling to Overcome Loss Aversion: A Method for Improving Legislative Outcomes
• EBRI: Sources of Health Insurance and Characteristics of the Uninsured: Analysis of the March 2009 Current Population Survey
• NIST: Small Business Information Security: The Fundamentals (draft)

1. Nearly half (48%) of working New Yorkers do not receive paid sick days, while 44% receive no paid vacation.  A full 39%–or 1.3 million workers in New York City–receive no paid leave (sick or vacation).
   • 66% of low-income workers in New York City lack paid sick leave, with Latinos faring the worst; more than 7 out of 10 Latinos lack paid sick leave.
   • 60% of low-income working moms in New York City lack paid sick leave for themselves and for their children.
2. Availability of paid sick leave is declining across income spectrums.
   • Where 56% of the near-poor had paid sick leave in 2007, only 33% have it in 2009.
   • Where 82% of moderate to high-income workers had it in 2004, only 63% have it in 2009.
3. Workers in unions are more likely to receive paid sick leave; 64% of those in union jobs have paid sick days versus 48% of those in non-union jobs.
4. Workers in small businesses in New York City are the least likely to receive paid sick leave; nearly two-thirds of those in businesses with 10 or fewer employees lack paid sick leave.  The authors underscore that these small businesses hire over 26% of all New Yorkers.
5. Workers in the service sectors, construction and manufacturing are the least likely to receive paid sick leave, with a full 68% of working New Yorkers lacking paid sick leave in the leisure, hospitality, retail and wholesale areas.
6. When no paid sick leave is provided, low-income workers who take time off to care for themselves or a sick child are more likely to be threatened with retaliation in the form of docked pay, job loss, or suspension.
7. The lack of paid sick leave results in public health consequences, including the spread of contagious illnesses, like H1N1, and higher health care costs. Low-income workers without paid sick leave are more likely to go to work sick, and more likely to rely on emergency room visits to tend to routine medical issues. Even when these workers have health insurance coverage, the ER provides care outside of work hours and does not jeopardize job security.
8. Most New Yorkers, across income and political party lines, support the passage of a paid sick law.

For more information on paid sick days, generally, visit our mini-brief and topic page on the matter.

As a mom, I want my children to be bilingual. Why not give them every advantage when they one day enter the job market? But as a working mom, finding the time and making the commitment to teach my children a second language has been more difficult than I expected.

I’ve discovered that other parents are struggling, too. It’s Nia Yasher’s third go round at raising a bilingual child and this time she’s sending her daughter to a Spanish-language school. Yasher, a Cuban-American insurance agent in Miami, who grew up speaking Spanish in her home, has two older daughters who aren’t fluent in both languages. “Teaching our kids Spanish is hard for my generation,” Yasher says.

Today, working parents who grew up speaking Spanish, Creole, Portuguese, Hebrew and other languages have so much else on their plates that raising a bilingual child often becomes complicated, overwhelming and the chore on their to-do list that they let slide. In an era where most families rely on two incomes, working parents may have the desire to teach their children their native tongue, but lack the time and energy required to carry out their good intentions.

The recession is teaching us a lesson: being bilingual — even multilingual — is a huge career advantage and learning it as an adult is challenging. CareerBuilder.com has hundreds of jobs advertised in almost every industry seeking workers who are bilingual. There’s other incentives, too. Bilingualism has also proven to be beneficial for the cognitive development of young children, Jennifer Santiago writes for Babyzone.

As many bilingual parents know, the key to teaching a child a language is consistency. This is where I went wrong. Here in South Florida, where much of the population speaks more than one language, I had my oldest child begin life learning Spanish and English. When she started school, I had her tutored in Spanish. Even though she hears Spanish in the community, I didn’t keep up with it the lessons or practice with her and she has lost her fluency. As a parent who has struggled all my life to become fluent in Spanish, I feel guilty.

It’s that guilt that keeps Roberto Giuffredi of Step by Step Languages in Miami in business. Giuffredi says he’s been surprised by the demand since opening his language school seven years ago. Giuffredi has taught Spanish to about 600 children of Hispanic parents who typically have some Spanish spoken to them at home — just not enough to make them fluent.

Of the 53 million U.S. children between 5 and 17, about 15 percent are bilingual, according to the U.S. census 2008 American Community Survey. Several factors complicate parents’ efforts to raise a bilingual child. They include whether they are the first or second generation in the United States, whether both spouses speak the language, whether extended family are nearby to reinforce the language, whether the desire to assimilate is stronger than the interest in passing a second language on to offspring, and fear of delayed speech skills.

Of course, grandparents can be helpful. Ana Lopez-Blazquez says as the daughter of Cuban refugees she went out of her way to teach her two children her native Spanish. But her home has three generations under one roof, with grandparents who don’t speak English and reinforced her efforts while she was at work.

Jeannette Kaplun, co-founder and chief content officer of Todobebe.com,  a website for Spanish-speaking parents, says ensuring your child is bilingual requires mom and dad taking a tough stance. “The older they get, the more they prefer to speak back to you in English. They resist and you have to resist, too.”

Kaplun offers advice to working parents who feel overwhelmed: Listen to music in another language, watch Disney movies or cartoons, read books at story time, play games.  “It doesn’t have to be seen as a chore.”

Of course, there’s also Yasher’s approach, the one I’m considering again: outsource it. As Yasher notes, “At least with my daughter taking classes, I know she’s getting the basics.”

• Our latest Topic Page, Single Workers, is live! Thank you to Caroline Ogilvy and Jane Case for compiling and Bella DePaulo for advising. Please let us know what you think!

New, free work-life content online:

• CLASP: New Report Reveals Higher State Poverty Rates Based on Alternative Measure
• National Science Foundation: Minority Students Earned Greater Number of Academic Degrees in Fiscal Year 2006
• Center for Retirement Research at Boston College: The National Retirement Risk Index: After the Crash
• Pew Internet & American Life Project: Social Isolation and New Technology
• Monthly Labor Review: Part-Time Workers: Some Key Differences Between Primary and Secondary Workers
  

Summer vacation season is over and we have definitely moved into fall. As we celebrated National Work and Family Month this October, I wanted to look back to see if workers took vacations this summer, identify the benefits of vacations and discuss the status of vacations in the U.S. Vacations are a critical work-family issue as they provide an opportunity to relax, reconnect with the important people in our lives, and have time to pursue our personal passions.

A poll conducted from August 1-September 11, 2009 on the Sloan Work and Family Research Network website found the following among 74 respondents:

Are you taking vacation time this summer?

Yes, I am taking the time that I desire ….. 23%

Yes, but I am taking less time than I want to ….. 30%

No, I don’t have the money for vacation this year ….. 27%

No, I’m too busy at work ….. 14%

No, I am afraid that it will put my job at risk ….. 7%

So, what does this tell us? Granted, this is a small, rather unscientific sample, but only about a quarter of respondents took the time that they wanted. Another 30% took some time, but wish that they could have taken more. Just under half (48%) did not take vacation time because they didn’t have the money, were too busy, or were afraid that it would put their jobs at risk. Half of the respondents did take some time off, but almost half did not. Should we be concerned?

An interesting article by David Rock in Psychology Today found that if you are a knowledge worker who thinks for work, there are benefits to a break. He reports that time away from a problem allows you to get unstuck from your typical way of viewing situations and promotes new perspectives. Research also finds that we are more effective at solving difficult problems when our minds are less cluttered, which is more likely to occur if we get our heads out of work — for example, by taking a vacation.

A new report by the Families and Work Institute, “The State of Health in the American Workforce,” found a decrease over the past 6 years in the number of employees indicating that their overall health is “excellent” (from 34 to 28%). Co-author Ellen Galinsky says, ” …organizations can promote wellness by monitoring overwork and providing and encouraging employees to take their vacations.” Other indicators of poorer health include more stress, clinical depression, difficulty sleeping, and medical conditions such as high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol. Read more here.

Author Joe Robinson echoes these findings in his book, Work to Live. People who take vacations are less likely to have heart attacks or other illnesses compared to those who don’t take vacations. “But it only starts to work that way when you take at least a two-week block of time,” says Robinson. A long weekend or a few days off doesn’t promote better health; we need a chunk of time off to reap positive health benefits.

Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. is an outlier around vacation time with 137 countries (including all industrialized nations) mandating a minimum of 4 weeks of paid vacation time. In the U.S., there are no laws requiring employees to have any paid vacation time so employers offer paid vacation time at their discretion. As noted by Julie Weber here on the Work and Family Blog,

“The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that about one fourth of the U.S. workforce has no paid vacation in the course of their work year. Part-time workers, low-income earners, and workers in small establishments (fewer than 100 workers) are less likely to receive paid vacation and paid holidays, and when they do, these workers receive fewer paid days off.”

Thankfully, there has been some recent attention in the U.S. to mandating vacation time. In May of this year, Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) introduced the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, which would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to require that employers provide a minimum of 1 week of paid annual leave to employees at companies with at least 100 employees. Advocates of the bill note that vacations are important for family well-being as well as for improving workplace productivity.

Vacations — who needs them? We all do! What is it going to take to move us from a nation of overworked, unhealthy, stressed out Americans with no time to relax, explore our passions or engage with our families? Of course, we have to start by taking care of ourselves as much as that is realistic given our financial and employment situations these days. We definitely need to prioritize taking vacation time, but this can’t just be an individual responsibility. Supervisors and managers have to support our efforts to take a vacation, so we can return to work as more productive and healthier contributors.

Employers have to support the use — not just the availability — of vacation time. This requires changing the culture of the workplace and moving our thinking from vacation as a burden for the work team and for the organization to an opportunity for employees to recharge so they’ll return to work more creative and engaged.

Marcy Karin is an Associate Clinical Professor of Law and Director of a new Work-Life Policy Unit of the Civil Justice Clinic at the ASU Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. Her research interests include workplace law, policy, and practice, civil justice and litigation, and women’s legal history. She is also an active member of the national work-life law and policy community. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

Military families have acute needs for workplace flexibility. Dealing with multiple deployments, war-related disabilities and injuries, frequent moves, geographic isolation from services at bases, transitions back to civilian life, and other service-related needs impact servicemembers and their families in a real way. Military families also struggle with many work-life stresses that all families face. As The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation correctly notes, “policies that ease the strains on service members’ families” must be enacted.

Last week, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (NDAA 2010) into law. The NDAA 2010 includes the Supporting Military Families Act of 2009, which expands the qualifying exigency and military caregiver provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). President Bush enacted these provisions last year in the first successful attempt to amend the FMLA.

Under the 2008 FMLA expansion, eligible employees are allowed to take up to 12 weeks of job-protected time off for any qualifying exigency arising out of the fact that the spouse, son, daughter, or parent of an employee is on active duty (or has been notified of an impending call to active duty) in the National Guard or Reserves in support of a contingency operation. Department of Labor regulations define a qualifying exigency to include short-notice deployment, military events and related activities, childcare and school activities, financial and legal arrangements, counseling, rest and recuperation, post-deployment activities, and any other service-related activity that the employer and employee agree is a qualifying exigency.

The 2008 law also created military caregiver leave, which allows an eligible employee (spouse, son, daughter, parent, or next of kin of a covered servicemember) to take up to 26 weeks of job-protected time off to care for a wounded servicemember.

The NDAA 2010 expands the scope of who may take time off under the 2008 provisions. Specifically, the new law allows:

• family members of active duty members of the regular Armed Forces to use qualifying exigency leave when the servicemember is deployed to a foreign country. (The 2008 law only applied to family members of the National Guard and Reserves who were called to active duty in support of a contingency operation.);

• federal employees to use qualifying exigency leave. (Only certain federal employees were allowed to use it under the 2008 law.);

• military caregiver leave to be taken for veterans who served within 5 years of the date of medical treatment, recuperation, or therapy. (The 2008 law only applied to servicemembers who were currently in the military.); and

• military caregiver leave for existing or preexisting injuries that are aggravated in the line of duty during active duty service. (The current regulations deny coverage for these injuries.).

The expansions took effect when the President signed the law. Proposed regulations from the Department of Labor and the Office of Personnel Management, which will be drafted in consultation with the Secretaries of Defense and Veterans Affairs, should be issued shortly.

At the bill signing ceremony, President Obama noted that this law “reaffirms our commitment to our brave men and women in uniform and our wounded warriors.” This is just the first of many laws that President Obama will likely sign that reaffirm this commitment and provide military families with access to additional time off and other types of workplace flexibility. We can also expect the President to fulfill his campaign promise to support the needs of all workers as they struggle to find a work-life balance. Stay tuned for more action from the Obama Administration in the months and years to come. In the meantime, employers should revise their FMLA policies to reflect the NDAA 2010, as well as notify employees of these changes.

For more stories about the flexibility needs of military families, listen to the remarks of Dr. Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, Kelly Hruska, Sheila Casey, and Patricia Kempthorne at this 2008 Workplace Flexibility 2010 briefing.

We connect with millions of people across the globe, yet we have trouble sitting down to share a meal with those we love. We’re often so busy being “productive” that we wind up racing right past the important moments in life.

I’m thinking about time because I just wrote one of my “Balancing Acts” columns in the Globe on the declining health of the American worker. Our experience of time is a key to understanding how we can gain a better quality of life, with deeper human connections.

The new report by the Families and Work Institute shows that too many of us are fat, sick, sleepless and inactive. Just 28 percent of U.S. workers say their health is excellent, down from 34 percent six years ago. Workers in poor health are less likely to be loyal, engaged and satisfied with their jobs, the findings show.

Why are we so unhealthy? Certainly, many of us don’t exercise or eat right, and at the heart of these poor habits is often a time drought. About 60 percent feel they don’t have time for themselves, and an equal number report a lack of time for a partner or spouse. Chillingly, 75 percent report not having enough time with their children.

Moreover, those who most often don’t have enough time for the important people in their lives report poorer health – more depression, higher stress, more minor health problems. Nearly half of people who often or very often don’t have time for family and friends show signs of depression, compared with a third of those who sometimes feel this kind of time famine.

Vacations boost health, too. People with paid vacation time are less depressed and stressed than those without any paid holidays. The longer the vacation taken, the more likely a worker is to show few minor health problems. Still, 40 percent of workers don’t take all their vacation time, and the longest vacation taken on average in 2008 was nine days.

I believe that as a result of the mechanization of the Industrial and Digital Ages, we now pattern ourselves after our machinery. We seem to believe that we can be 24/7 beings, who interact in snippets and tweets, measuring our worth quantitatively. This collective adoration of the machine changes our experience of time, and squeezes the serendipity, mystery, and poetry out of our lives. And it just might be killing us, too.