Archive for September, 2009

New Report Finds Part-Time Law Partners a Boon to Business and Employees

Julie Schwartz Weber September 30th, 2009

While part-time work has been a viable option for many workers attempting to balance work and family lives, it has not, generally or traditionally, been available to most law partners. In fact, historically, working part-time in the law has been seen as professional suicide. However, a new study just released by The Project for Attorney Retention, Reduced Hours, Full Success: Part-Time Partners in U.S. Law Firms, demonstrates that there is evidence that providing part-time partners options to employees can be a “win-win” for employees and firms. More specifically, this report shows that law firms can successfully implement reduced-hour programs and that part-time lawyers and their law firms will prosper because of these programs.

The premise of the report is that part-time partners are “key to the law firms’ long-term financial health” and that providing part-time partnership options affords firms the opportunity to attract and retain excellent lawyers from a larger pool of applicants, including groups that value work-life balance (e.g., mothers and Generation Yers). This report also asserts that providing part-time partnership options helps firms “save recruiting costs by hiring fewer new lawyers, retain a diverse group of lawyers, reduce attrition costs, attract new clients, and increase the satisfaction of current clients.”

Some of the key findings of the report include the following:

  1. Part-time partners rarely work set schedules and their schedules are mainly driven by client needs (with many such partners regularly working more than 40 hours a week);
  2. Reduced hours programs attracted and retained many partners, and in fact, many lawyers were drawn to their firms because of the possibility of reduced hours;
  3. Client service is not compromised by part-time schedules, and in many cases, clients are unaware of the part-time schedule due to the responsiveness and availability of the partners;
  4. Many part-time partners are financially successful at their firms, and that, in fact, part-time lawyers generate significant revenue both from their own billable hours and from the origination of new business;
  5. Most part-time partners (60%) from the study reported they did not feel stigmatized because of their part-time status.

In addition to its main findings, the report also includes “Best Practices Recommendations for Law Firms,” which provides specific steps firms can take to invest in their part-time partners and thus their firm’s bottom line. Moreover, this new report includes “Recommendations for a Successful Part-Time Partnership,” drawn directly from respondents’ experiences and written for attorneys who are hoping to be successful part-time partners.

Let it Rain: Isotoner Decision on Breastfeeding At Work Brings a Downpour of Criticism

Featured Guest Blogger September 28th, 2009

Adria B. Martinelli has practiced employment law in Delaware since joining Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor in 2001 as a senior associate in the Employment Law Section. She is also a regular speaker on employment-related topics, and trains individual employers in various areas of employment law, including sexual harassment, performance evaluations and documentation, and exceptions to at-will employment. Adria serves as an editor of the Delaware Employment Law Letter and writes for the Delaware Employment Law Blog. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

On August 27, the Ohio Supreme Court Court issued its opinion in Allen v. Totes/Isotoner Corp.  The plaintiff claimed she was terminated for taking breaks to pump breast milk, which was a violation of Ohio’s Pregnancy Discrimination Act.  In its two-page opinion, the majority said that the employee was fired for not following company policy on breaks, period.  End of story, plain and simple.

Apparently this is not so, judging on the uproar this decision has created in the blogosphere:

Totes/Istoner Boycott Urged:  Breast-Feeding Moms Take the Gloves Off
Oh, Those Lactation Regulations
Ohio to Nursing Mothers:  Get Those Breasts on a Schedule
Lactate on Your Own Time, Lady
Lactation, Breastfeeding, Discrimination and Accommodation
When Breast Milk Production Doesn’t Fit Like a Glove With an Employer’s Schedule

It appears many out there misapprehend the nature of the protections provided under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.  While Isoner’s actions certainly seem unduly harsh and unreasonable, they were not illegal.  On the federal level, the PDA was an amendment to Title VII, enacted in 1978, which clarified that discrimination based on “sex” included discrimination based on “pregnancy or related conditions.”  Most states, including Ohio, have amended their state law similarly, and follow federal law on the interpretation of their statute.

The PDA provides that you cannot treat employees differently because they are pregnant or have pregnancy-related conditions.  It doesn’t say you have to treat them better. So, in general, to state a discrimination claim the pregnant employee has to (1) show evidence of discrimination based on pregnancy, typically in the form of remarks pertaining to pregnancy or related condition; or (2) show that she was not afforded the same benefits or protections as non-pregnant employees. In the Isotoner case, the company had a policy on the breaks, and the plaintiff did not follow it. There was no evidence to suggest that Isotoner was unhappy with the fact she was breastfeeding–they just didn’t like the fact that she was away from her workstation without proper authorization. There was no evidence they would have treated a non-lactating employee differently if he or she took breaks of similar duration and without permission.

The Ohio Supreme Court’s decision was perfectly consistent with current law. The only shocking part about the case was the lower (appellate) court’s baffling conclusion that lactation was not protected under Ohio’s pregnancy discrimination laws, apparently based on the principle that a mother could discontinue breastfeeding if she chose to do so. Only the concurring decision by O’Connor on the Ohio Supreme Court bothered to address this absurdity. Of course lactation is a “pregnancy-related” condition! We don’t need the medical definition of “colostrum” to figure that out (but thanks, anyway, Justice O’Connor). The suggestion that because a woman could stop lactation if she wanted to is irrelevant; it does not negate the fact that if she chooses not to impede nature on this matter, it’s pregnancy-related. The public policy implications of such a ruling are insane–essentially punishing a mother for making the medically-recommended decision to continue breastfeeding her baby after she returns to work.

Much to the chagrin of women’s rights advocates everywhere, the PDA is limited in its protections. At the time it was passed, many companies were terminating female employees outright upon announcement of their pregnancy. It was thought then (and by some now) that it was enough to say “we’re going to treat you the same as any other employee.” Now, 30 years after the passage of the PDA, we’ve had plenty of time to observe that maybe we need more. Certain conditions related to pregnancy (nursing among them) are unique and require unique accommodations if we are to enable women (particularly new mothers) to succeed in the workplace.

Nursing moms may need up to 20 minutes every two to three hours to nurse, with less frequent breaks as the baby gets older. Typically, these requirements are not going to fit squarely into the employer’s existing break policy. There is unanimity among the medical profession regarding the health benefits of breast milk. Laws are in place in nearly every state protecting a woman’s right to breastfeed in public.  There is a gaping hole regarding a woman’s right to breastfeed (or pump) at work.  The PDA should be amended to (1) clarify that lactation is a “pregnancy-related condition” protected by the statute; and (2) require employers to “accommodate” pumping breaks of reasonable length and frequency.

What’s New from the Network?

Karen Corday September 25th, 2009

New from the Network:

New, free content in work-life:

Geography Plays a Part in Access to Work-Family Benefits

Julie Schwartz Weber September 23rd, 2009

The Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire recently published a new brief, “Family-Friendly Policies for Rural Working Mothers.” This brief, authored by Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow Rebecca Glauber, analyzes the differences in access to family-friendly policies between rural and urban mothers. Glauber concludes that rural women are less likely than their urban counterparts to have access to family-friendly policies, including paid sick days, parental leave, flextime, and health insurance.

Importantly, Glauber asks why this difference in access exists. She writes that there are a “number of factors that contribute to the rural- -urban gap in mothers’ access.” While she indicates that education is a “strong predictor of access to family-friendly policies,” she asserts that approximately 50% of the gap in access to sick or vacation days is due to differences in rural mothers’ versus urban mothers’ work establishment size, occupation, and industry, and unionization. That is, rural workers tend to work in smaller places and in industries that provide fewer benefits.

In addition, Glauber finds that a particular subset of rural mothers – single mothers – fare particularly poorly concerning access to family-friendly policies. For instance, according to Glauber, 41% of rural single mothers do not have access to paid sick days compared to 38% of all rural mothers and 30% of urban mothers. Similarly, Glauber finds that over one-fifth of rural single mothers do not have access to any paid days off (sick days or vacation days) compared to 16% of all rural mothers and 14% of urban mothers. Again, Glauber concludes that single rural mothers have the least access to family-friendly benefits because they have less education, work for smaller firms, and work in jobs that are less likely to offer benefits.

To find more information on rural families and work-family issues, please see our Work and Family Encyclopedia entry “Rural Families and Work-Family Issues,” by Lisa R. Pruitt.

Flexible Work and Disaster Planning: Dancing with New Partners

Featured Guest Blogger September 21st, 2009

Sandy Burud, Ph.D., is a researcher, consultant and author on human capital and work-life. She is the Chief Strategy Officer for FlexPaths, a flexibility-focused software platform for employers and employment portal for individuals. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

If we are to see truly flexible workplaces anytime soon,  it’s important that we get beyond our own circles and collaborate with new partners whose interests align with ours. I’d like to see us pay more attention to business continuity planners.

It’s easy to superficially add ‘business continuity’ to the list of advantages brought by flexible workplaces — businesses can continue operating in an emergency if teams are skilled at flexible work. But as I read more deeply about it, I find some gems that make my eyes pop out. One in five US businesses suffers a disaster that causes it to cease operations for a time. Of course there are the big ones — earthquakes, tornadoes, horrific man-made disasters, but did you know the scale? Seventy-five of them in 2008, says FEMA. And, 43% of companies that go through a severe crisis never open their doors again; another 29% fail within 2 years. Add to that the day-to-day, basement-flooding variety that may not put a company out of business but still throws a big kink into productivity, and it’s clear why disaster plans need to be taken seriously.

Disaster plans typically involve paying to reserve alternative space in which to operate in the event of a disaster. Ah, but if people are already equipped, trained, and comfortable working from home or some alternate workplace (that serves lattes), it means those costs are avoided and can be added to the plus column of direct savings (aka ‘hard dollars’) from flexible work. Put that in your flexibility ROI analysis! I certainly added it to our white paper on the business case for workplace flexibility public policies: Flexible Work: In Whose Best Interest?

The real kicker, though, is this: we proponents of flexibility struggle to get businesses to ‘offer’ flex. As disaster planners see that teams who can work on the spur of the moment from anywhere, anytime can literally save the business, the disaster planners have begun to do something we have not. They have begun to require (yes, I said ‘require’) that teams (individuals, managers, and executives) practice working flexibly on a regular basis. Otherwise, the reasoning goes, people will not remember the access codes, know the tricks for sharing documents, etc. — all the things that are critical to smoothly functioning in an emergency.

When the disaster planning team says, ‘you will do this’….everyone listens. Now that’s a partner.

What’s New From the Network?

Karen Corday September 18th, 2009

New from the Network:

  • Please take our new poll: At your workplace, do you experience tension between workers of different generations around work style and expectations? Available on our home page or at our blog.
  • Who’s Who in Work and Family: Our own Policy Specialist, Julie Weber
  • New Statutes by Theme, which are presented primarily for state policy makers to help provide an overview of the laws that have been passed in various states that are relevant to work and family issues: Breastfeeding and the Workplace, Flexible Work Schedules, and Telework.

New, free work-life content online:

Older, Working Students Go Back to School, Too

Featured Guest Blogger September 17th, 2009

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her penetrating coverage of U.S. social issues. She writes the popular “Balancing Acts” column in the Sunday Boston Globe, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica, and on National Public Radio. Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, details the steep costs of our current epidemic deficits of attention while revealing the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus in a world of speed and overload. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

I was talking with a fellow parent recently and the conversation turned to the subject of college, as it’s wont to do when you have a high school senior. “I want to go to school!” said the father eagerly, as we discussed the expanding opportunities on campuses today – from interdisciplinary majors to study abroad programs. “What did I know back then about going to school?”

Here’s a bit of good news, both for this dad and for us all. As I wrote in my Boston Globe column last week, mature students are the wave of the future. By 2007, more than a third of people studying for an associate’s or higher degrees were 25 and older. By 2017, the ranks of these older students are expected to grow 20 percent, according to government statistics.

This is a crucial trend. Sure, we all talk about lifelong learning and the need to update skills in a “knowledge economy.” That’s true. Most kids won’t be making widgets or car parts by hand anymore. But even more importantly, we have an alarming education gap in this country. As the country ages, we need to open the doors to higher education as often as we can over the life course – or fall terribly behind the rest of the world economically and culturally.

Consider this. In a comparison of 30 developed countries, we rank second behind Canada in the proportion of adults ages 35 to 64 who have college degrees, but we place seventh in rankings of graduates ages 25 to 34. Why? We have a leaky pipeline. More than 16 percent of U.S. young people ages 16 to 24  – or 6 million people  – are high school dropouts, and only about 65 percent of students return for a second year of community college or graduate from a four-year college within six years.

We need to plug the pipeline early, by getting kids to stay in school and graduate. But helping adults return to school is important too. Someone who’s born into a family in the lowest fifth of earners who graduates from college has a 62 percent chance of eventually joining the middle class or better, according to a recent report by the Brookings Institution. As well, high school grads currently have a 60 percent lower jobless rate than dropouts.

The bottom line is that schooling makes a huge difference in the trajectory of a life – no matter the age of the student. A lack of school drags you down each day, like a bully in the playground.

Night school, anyone?

Most Popular Downloads from the Sloan Work and Family Research Network

Judi Casey September 16th, 2009

We just finished our Year 2 (July 1, 2008-June 30, 2009) report for the Sloan Foundation.  It’s been a great year! Traffic to the Network website has tripled over the past year to over 300,000 unique visitors and over 550,000 page views (compared to 104,318 visits last year, when our visits doubled from the previous year). Through direct outreach and site traffic, we added 682 new affiliates.  Lastly, we received two Apex Awards for our high-quality monthly newsletter, the Network News.

According to Google Analytics, the top five downloaded documents were:

  1. Flexible Work Schedules Fact Sheet, a compilation of stats in Q&A format by topic,  answers the following questions:
    • Are workers satisfied with their work-family balance?
    • How do families deal with the work-family time crunch?
    • Do workers have access to flexible work schedules?
    • Much more!
  2. Effective Workplace Series: Flexible Work Schedule, a one-page summary of our Topic Page, considers:
    • Why are organizations implementing flexible work schedules?
    • What are the benefits of flexible work schedules?
    • Why are flexible work schedules an important workplace issue?
  3. Women in the Workplace Fact Sheet focuses on
    • How many women are in the workforce?
    • Where are women working?
    • What is the impact of women in leadership positions?
  4. Generation X/Generation Y Fact Sheet looks at
    • How have gender roles in the workforce and at home changed for Generation X and Generation Y?
    • How does Generation Y make employment decisions?
    • What does Generation Y expect from and value about their careers?
  5. Changing Definition of Families Fact Sheet explores
    • How have families changed?
    • How have marriage trends changed?
    • What do we know about households today?

Check them out if you haven’t read them.

Back to School Means Back to Basics

Featured Guest Blogger September 14th, 2009

Christina Barlowe founded LifeWork Alliance in 2008 to address the paradigm shift that is reshaping today’s workforce and institute and promote open dialogue between organizations and working parents. Nearly two decades of professional corporate experience, coupled with an MBA and a Masters in Social Work, form the well-rounded skill set necessary to head the innovative organization that is LifeWork Alliance. Christina has a four year old son and a newly adopted little boy who has reshaped her life and has been her source of inspiration.

It’s September. The air is crisper, the sky seems clearer, and the roads are more congested. Let the games begin! When you have children and you work, the anticipation of September seems as anxiety-provoking as it did when you were a kid starting a new grade.

One of the essential things I have learned is to slow things down; somehow it all manages to get done, eventually. This is termed as the concept of “good enough,” which is not easy for many of us Type A’s to swallow. Sometimes, in fact, approaching a challenge in the most rudimentary fashion is a fail-safe way to ensure that it gets done. As a working parent in today’s society, there is so much planning around an actual event, be it the beginning of a new school year for our children or the purging of old clothes and general fall straightening of the house. It’s a wonder that any of these new tasks get done in addition to our already demanding schedules!

September allows us to refocus, regroup and re-organize, three of my favorite things to do. Fall is the time of year we remember from our childhoods, when were excited about all the new school year had to offer; it is a joy that stays with us. September is invigorating, and embracing all that it has to offer brings us back to basics….stay healthy, be kind, learn something new every day, and say “I love you” to those who matter most before heading out for the day. These are the things that sustain us and these are the tenants that help us grow as people, however basic they may seem.

What’s New from the Network?

Karen Corday September 11th, 2009

New from the Network:

  • Please take our new poll: At your workplace, do you experience tension between workers of different generations around work style and expectations? Answer on our home page or on the blog.
  • Who’s Who in Work and Family: Jamie Ladge
  • All of the maps from the Policy Briefing Series are now in one place on Mapping State Policies.

New, free work-life content online:

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