The joy of flex: employees shouldn't need an excuse to get flexible work schedules. Employers should need a reason not to give them

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2005 by Karen Kornbluh

A generation or more ago, it would have been impossible to envision the life of the American worker as it is lived today. A flood of women into the workforce has fundamentally changed the face of employment, largely for the better. Families are better able to increase their household income, and companies have benefited from the ability to tap female talent. But at home, working Americans have a dwindling amount of time to spend with their families. The parent who was home in the afternoon when kids came back from school, or cared for family members--young or old--who fell ill, is now hard at work. A snow day now creates a parent's Hobson's choice: leave a child alone or call in sick and maybe risk losing your job.

The stress over how to strike a balance between work and family worries parents. A 2002 report by the Families and Work Institute found that 45 percent of employees say that work and family responsibilities interfere with each other, and 67 percent of working parents say they do not have enough time with their children. But it's not a problem limited to individual families--the work-family puzzle concerns their fellow Americans as well. Last year, pollsters Anna Greenberg and Bill McInturff found that more than three-quarters of likely voters feel it is difficult for parents to earn enough and still have time for their families; 84 percent agreed that children are shortchanged when their parents have to work long hours.

The failure of the workplace to make accommodations for working parents is one of the biggest unmet demands of American voters. Shrewdly, Republicans understand this, but they have used it in order to promote a solution that doesn't solve the problem. During last year's presidential campaign, George W. Bush made a direct appeal to working mothers, running an ad in the final weeks that featured a mother driving home from work and growing increasingly exasperated as the radio told her that John Kerry would raise her taxes. To these mothers, Bush offered so-called "comp-time," which he claimed would help them balance work and family responsibilities by letting them choose time off instead of overtime pay as compensation for extra hours worked. But under Bush's plan, workers who accrued comp-time wouldn't have the freedom to decide when they would use it. Employers could make workers redeem the time when it was convenient for them, not for the employees.

There are, however, strategies that do give parents a way to both work and retain control over their own schedules without shortchanging their families--everything from telecommuting to job-sharing to flextime. But these arrangements are primarily available to those with well-paying, white-collar jobs; more than half of all workers have no control over how their hours are scheduled. This may be the reason why politicians and policymakers have, for the most part, failed to focus on the work-family balance issue in a serious way. Not everyone has the same kind of malleable--if still busy--schedules they enjoy.

As the expectations and demands of the workplace have expanded over the past few decades, we have allowed onerous hours and schedules to become the norm, and we have assumed that employers have the right to demand that workers adapt to these harsh schedules or face the consequences. It's time to change the presumption that accepting a job means handing control of your life over to your employer. There is a clear role for the government here: expanding federal support for childcare and after-care, for instance. But there is also something that government can do that wouldn't be costly to the federal budget, something that employer groups would have a hard time opposing, and that is already working in the United Kingdom--empower workers to ask for flexible scheduling themselves.

My job, my time

American politicians aren't the only ones who have to worry about appealing to soccer moms. Since the mid-1990s, the New Labour agenda has reflected an attempt to identify and address the concerns of working mothers--and fathers. Five years ago, Tony Blair's government introduced an initiative intended to give working parents more flexibility without impinging on business competitiveness: the "Work-Life Balance Campaign."

The policy which went into effect in 2003, works like this: Any parent with one or more children tinder the age of six, who has worked at least 26 consecutive weeks, has the right to file a written request with his or her employer for a change in working hours--be that in the form of compressed hours, flex-time, telecommuting, job-sharing, shift-working, or staggered hours. The employee must explain exactly how the proposed schedule would work and offer solutions to any inconvenience that might be caused to the employer. For their part, employers are required to meet with any worker who has filed such a request within four weeks to discuss the proposed plan, and they must notify the employee of a decision within two weeks of that meeting.