• MDRC: Strategies to Help Low-Wage Workers Advance
• New America Foundation: Flexible Work Arrangements and Low-Wage Work [includes video of this week's panel discussion on this topic]
• Kauffman Foundation: The Coming Entrepreneurial Boom
• New Zealand Ministry of Women’s Affairs: Men’s Participation in Unpaid Care: A Review of the Literature
• IZA: Down From the Mountain: Skill Upgrading and Wages in Appalachia
  
• IZA: How Does Retirement Affect Health?
• Economic Policy Institute: Who are the Uninsured?: An Analysis of America’s Uninsured Population, Their Characteristics, and Their Health

1. Playcheck: “Many retirees take temporary or part-time work to fund the hobbies and trips they want to enjoy during retirement. Take my sister, who is retired from a warehouse job and wanted to go skiing in Colorado. Her husband was concerned about the expense, so she went back to work at the plant for eight weeks during the pre-Christmas rush. No worries about the cost of the ski trip–her playcheck covered it.” (Hulett, 2009)

2. Staycation: “Staycation is the new “too broke to go anywhere.” According to Wikipedia, “staycation” may have its origins in a hit Canadian TV comedy called “Corner Gas,” which premiered in 2004. Ben Zimmer, executive producer for the Visual Thesaurus cites an earlier use–a 1999 online review of a trip on the Celebrity cruise line. “It’s difficult to predict what staying power the term will have beyond the current trend,” says Zimmer, “since it could be the type of word that is promoted heavily in the media and just fades away.” (Frolick, 2008)

3. Exurbia: A spatial pattern of settlement that differs from suburbia in that it is located farther from urban centers and features a different mix of land uses and population (Exurban Exchange Program, n.d.). Exurbia is characterized by low population density, high population growth, and commuting to urbanized areas for work.  It is often associated with rural gentrification, as people willing to commute long distances move to rural places, raising the cost of living there while also transforming those places socially. (Berube, Singer Wilson, & Frey, 2006; Salamon 2003a; Salamon 2003b)

4. Jhobby: “This is the phenomenon of turning your hobby into a job during your retirement. Did you collect model trains or Hot Wheels cars? Now in retirement, you are an eBay power seller whose electronic storefront sells such trains and cars. Or, more typically, you are the scratch golfer who works part time at the pro shop or maybe even does a little caddying.” (Hulett, 2009)

For the past nine years, we at the Center for Families at Purdue University have had the pleasure of working with my colleagues at the Boston College Center for Work & Family and our sponsor Alliance for Work-Life Progress to award the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work Family Research. Every year, an esteemed team of academics and researchers in the field review literally thousands of papers to come up with the 20 nominees for the Kanter Award, the “Best of the Best.” We seek out studies that relate to work-family issues that are not only academically rigorous, but also have direct, actionable implications for real-world organizations.

This year our winner addressed the important and provocative issue of the wage gap for mothers.  In “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?”, authors Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard and In Paik explored the chances that mothers would be called for an interview or recommended for hire, compared to childless women, fathers, and childless men. Evaluators consistently rated mothers as less competent and less committed to paid work than nonmothers.  In contrast, fathers were rated MORE positively than nonfathers. Childless women received 2.1 times as many callbacks as mothers with similar credentials. The researchers concluded that the ‘motherhood penalty’ is alive and well, even when examined with highly controlled experimental methods in both laboratory and ‘real life’ settings.

I had the honor of presenting the Kanter Award to lead author Shelley Correll of Stanford University at the Awards Breakfast at the World at Work Total Rewards Conference in Seattle.  She was delighted to receive the award and conveyed such pleasure that her research is able to have an impact on professionals in the field of human resources, which she hopes will bring more attention to the bias against mothers in the hiring process.

This year, we worked closely with AWLP’s Rising Stars to create a briefer, fresher, more usable publication.  Included in the Kanter Top Ten Takeaways brochure are a synopsis of the winning article for 2008 with author interview, the best actionable findings from the 20 nominated articles, and a full listing of the 20 nominated articles. We look forward to continuing to share more information about the nominated articles over the course of the year, as so many of them have interesting findings that can help guide corporate practice in the future.

Next year, we will celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award, as well as the anniversaries of our respective centers, and we look forward to beginning the review process for articles soon, to be sure that we continue to bring you the “Best of the Best” in Work Family Research, to help guide your policy and practice.

• June issue of the Network News, featuring an interview with Jeremy Adam Smith, author of The Daddy Shift.
• The Network won an Apex Award of Excellence in the category of Web & Electronic Newsletter for our January 2009 Network News issue, “A Historical Perspective on Work and Family.” This is our third Apex Award and we are thrilled!

New, free work-family content on the web:

• Center for Retirement Research at Boston College: Employers’ (Lack of ) Response to Retirement Income Challenge
• McKinsey Quarterly: Economic Conditions Snapshot, June 2009: McKinsey Global Survey Results
• U.S. Census Bureau: Census Bureau Reports Increase of Nearly 1 Million Nonemployer Businesses
  

On June 12th, Judge Thomas R. Cooper ruled that the paid sick day ordinance was invalidly enacted and unconstitutional.  More specifically, while the trial court upheld the part of the ordinance relating specifically to providing paid sick days to tend to the illness or preventative care of an employee or employee’s family member, he rejected the provision concerning time off for domestic violence victims to seek shelter or pursue legal action.  He ultimately concluded, “The provisions regarding domestic violence and sexual assault are not rationally related to the ordinance’s overall objective of protecting the public welfare, health, safety, and prosperity of the city”.

An appeal is likely.

A Better Balance has a more detailed analytical discussion about the trial court’s ruling available at its website.

I had this bright idea about how I would build a life with my partner and how things would become bigger and better as our careers grew and our family grew. Sure, I would work, but I would be able to scale back during those tender early years for my children, because of course my husband’s career would be blossoming. And then it happened– 2007, that is.  Most people didn’t speak the word “recession” until late 2008. For those of us in the New York area, however, the decline in stability and rise in fear happened about a year in advance. My husband lost his job, as many people did, and we saw it as the opportunity that would allow us to explore other options for him and for us. We quickly discovered a few problems with this plan: 1) We still needed to pay the mortgage as we were “exploring,” and 2) Things become increasingly harder at home because our usual roles had changed greatly. As much as we like to think that we are not gender role-specific in this day and age, it is a simple fact of conditioning that we still are bound to these roles, however loosely. We have slowly adapted to me being the primary breadwinner and he being the primary caregiver. Sure, there is jealously and resentment and even envy at times from both sides.

What has been more challenging than either one of these roles, though, have been the roles within the marriage. Who are we now? It is clearly different that what we were when we married and what we imagined we would become. Do we like these new people? Do we have a choice? I have found that communication, as clichéd as it sounds, is the key to mental and emotional survival in these circumstances. My husband is a wonderful father, and men in general are more involved with their children today than they were in the past, which is a blessing for all involved. Even if there are new rules that have been bestowed upon us in this new economy, the rules will always shift. It is an individual’s ability to adapt to those new roles; that is the necessary skill for survival.

• New Policy Brief:  School Involvement Leave
• Five new Policy Mini-Briefs:
  Breastfeeding
  Military Families
  Paid Sick Days
  Small Businesses
  Time Resources
• Three updated issues of the Effective Workplace Series:
  Employer-Supported Child Care
  Telework
  Today’s Diverse Families
• This summer, we are working on two new Topic Pages: Single Workers, with and without children, and The Changing Role of Fathers and Caregiving.  If you are an expert in either of these areas and have articles, reports or other recent resources to suggest for inclusion on the page, please contact us at wfnet@bc.edu.

New, free work-family content online:

• Urban Institute: Facts and Findings about Foreclosures, Families, and Communities
• White House Press Office: Fact Sheet: Presidential Memorandum on Federal Benefits and Non-Discrimination
• Pew Economic Mobility Project: Ups and Downs: Does the American Economy Still Promote Upward Mobility?
• AARP: State Health Care Briefs 2009: Why Health Care Reform is Important
• Center for Economic and Policy Research: Paid Sick Days Don’t Cause Unemployment
• Population Reference Bureau: Social Support, Networks, and Happiness
• U.S. Census Bureau:  Age and Sex in the United States: 2007 and 2008
• Catalyst: Report to Women in Capital Markets: Benchmarking 2008

I believe that flexible work practices will naturally continue to filter into the fabric of organizations — at the rate of an iceberg melting.  So, unless we’re willing to wait another generation or so, it will take a policy “push” to move things along.

We know that:

• Businesses thrive when they embrace flexible work practices. Employees are more focused, engaged, and productive, overhead costs are reduced, and earnings and shareholder returns grow. (Workers, families, the economy and the environment also benefit significantly.)
• Though many employers ‘allow’ flexibility, most employees still are not using it, even though most would prefer to do so.  In most organizations there are substantial barriers to its use, even in ‘best practice’ companies — a condition that has changed little over the last decade.
• A catalyst is required.  Businesses are not sufficiently motivated to ensure that everyone whose job is suited to flex can work flexibly, despite the fact that it’s in the organization’s best interest.
• A significant barrier to the widespread use of flexibility is the lack of systems to ensure consistency and practical application.  Managers and employees don’t know what’s possible and flexibility is inconsistently applied in most companies. (Hewitt, 2008) Employees are afraid to request it, fearing a subtle or not-so-subtle penalty. Nine in ten low-wage workers who do not use it would, if it carried no penalty. (WFD and Corporate Voices for Working Families, 2009) When employees do request it, they often are refused because their manager is resistant to considering the idea or lacks the support to make it work.
• A mandate?  While employers resist mandates and more regulation, a mandate that ensures a thoughtful consideration of an employee’s request for flexibility is one such motivator.  Companies say informally that without a doubt, such a mandate would cause them to be more systematic, consistent, and transparent in their decision-making about whether to grant employees’ requests.  Such a requirement would also encourage internal record keeping systems that by themselves would raise the level of knowledge.  The systems can include ‘informal’ flexibility — a change work hours or location on short notice — and ‘formal’ flexible arrangements negotiated in advance.
• Mandates should be coupled with incentives for companies to provide pragmatic information.  Incentives are also essential (tax incentives, for example) for employers to disseminate practical information internally, e.g., how to manage teams who work flexibly.  Incentives alone are not sufficient, however.  More is required to overcome the inertia of the old way of doing business.

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.

Much has been written in the legal blogosphere lately related to the topic of work-life balance.   Law 21, which describes itself as “Dispatches from a Legal Profession on the Brink,” recently posted a well-written and thought-provoking blog on this topic that concluded that “we’ll soon be closing the book on one of the legal profession’s most-used and least-understood phrases of the last decade: “work-life balance.””

Most commentators in this area seem to agree that—at least in the legal profession—any discussion or concern about work-life balance is a thing of the past.  A past when the economy was good, attorneys were in great demand, and law firms competed for the best and brightest by offering whatever they could to attract them.  This included at least engaging in discussion of the now-verboten work-life balance topic.

Few would disagree that economy drives this discussion.  Law firms (or any employers, for that matter) are rarely going to promote work-life balance because of their generosity or genuine concern for the well-being of their employees.  However, they will consider it when they believe it ultimately benefits their bottom line.  In good economic times, some employers bought into the notion that promoting work-life balance (or at least uttering the words during the hiring process) would make them competitive in recruiting the top candidates, and that retaining these qualified employees would also mean saving on the bottom line by not having to retrain new employees to replace those who might decide to leave the workplace as a result of inflexible work policies.

What is overlooked in the current gloom-and-doom forecasts, however, is that “flexible” (or reduced) work-schedules can also benefit the employer’s bottom line in a very direct way.  Typically, reduced or flexible schedule means reduced compensation.  In the legal world, reduced work-schedules usually means the attorney is “off,” or at least seriously derailed from, the partnership track.  Nobody wants to share the partnership pie in these trying economic times for firms.  The old model of the most desirable associate being one who was willing to do whatever it takes in terms of billable hours, in exchange for partnership on a 7-, 8-, or 9-year track, is no longer such an appealing one.

At the same time that people are declaring the end of work-life balance, law firms are delaying start dates for new associates, paying associates a portion of their salary to take a year off to spend time with their family or pursue non-profit endeavors, and some are apparently considering reducing attorneys to four-day work weeks. While these employer-driven, sometimes mandatory reduced schedules with accompanying reduced pay is certainly not ideal for many, it beats layoffs.  In the end, it continues to redefine the model of the perfect lawyer.  When the economy heads north again, I believe this rethinking of the old standard will help, not hurt, the work-life balance cause.

• Issue #17 of the Policy Briefing Series: Paid Family Leave
• New Bills By Theme: Paid Sick Leave
• Updated Fact Sheet: Overwork

New, free work and family content online:

• Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College: The Difference a Downturn Can Make: Assessing the Early Effects of the Economic Crisis on the Employment Experience of Workers
• Boston College Center for Work & Family: Work-Life in China
• New York University School of Law: The Undertraining of Lawyers and Its Effect on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in the Legal Profession
• Small Business Majority: The Economic Impact of Healthcare Reform on Small Business