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Monthly Labor Review, May, 2004

On April 6, 2003, British workers gained the statutory right to request flexible work arrangements such as compressed hours, job sharing, flexitime, or home working while British employers gained the statutory duty to take such requests seriously. According to a recent British Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Employment Relations Occasional Paper, a slender majority of employees surveyed from 5 to 12 months later were aware of their right to request and about one in eight had actually made such a request. The most commonly requested practices were part-time work and flexitime; meeting child care needs was by far the most frequent reason given for requesting flexible work. On the employers' side, 77 percent of requests were accepted outright and a further 9 percent were partially accepted or the subject of a compromise arrangement.

The Second Work-Life Balance Study: Results from the Employees' Survey (DTI Employment Relations Survey No. 27), a study based on a survey taken before the law was changed, also found that the most common request for job flexibility was for reduced hours and/or flexitime and that the most common reason for seeking such an arrangement was to care for children. In this baseline survey of employees, almost all respondents believed that people work best when they can balance their home and work lives and that employers had a role to play in helping with that balance. On the other hand, 60 percent of employees thought, quite realistically, that they shouldn't expect to be able to change their work arrangement if doing so would be too disruptive of the business.