Archive for the 'Publications' Category

What’s New in Work and Family

Karen Corday November 6th, 2009

New from the Network:

  • 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:

What’s New from the Network?

Jennifer Lawless October 30th, 2009

New from the Network:

National Work and Family Month at the Huffington Post:

Health Care in America: The Work-Family Effects: PART III: Health Care and American Businesses

Featured Guest Blogger October 28th, 2009

Andrew Kang is a Graduate Policy Assistant at the Sloan Work and Family Research Network. This is a continuation of PART I: The Current Health Care System in America and PART II: The American Health Care System and Families.

How Health Care Costs Affect Businesses:

Since most people get their health insurance through their jobs, employers are saddled with most of the burden of rising health care costs and insurance premiums. As employees’ shares of the cost of insurance increase, it is easy to ignore the financial expenses employers are absorbing on their employees’ behalf.

  • Health insurance expenses are the fastest growing cost components for employers.
  • In 2008, employer health insurance premiums increased by 5%, twice the rate of inflation.
  • Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums have been rising four times faster than workers’ earnings since 1999.
  • This increase places corresponding downward pressure on salary increases, new hiring, and capital investment.
  • For small businesses, health insurance premiums have increased 12% annually. Rapidly rising health insurance premiums are the main reason cited by small firms for not offering coverage.
  • Surging health care costs slow the rate of job growth, contributing to a recessionary economy) and making it more expensive for companies to add new workers.
  • The high cost of health care for businesses also suppresses wage growth for current workers by increasing total compensation costs.
  • As health care costs rise as a percentage of operations expenses, corporate operating margins are reduced, which limits the capacity of companies to grow through investment in research, plant and equipment.
  • High medical insurance costs place American firms at a disadvantage in world markets where they compete against companies with much lower health care costs in the nations where they operate.

Health Care For Profit

In America, health care is not considered a right, but a privilege to be earned. And as a privilege, a lot of money is made by providing it.

  • In 2007, health-related companies in the Fortune 1000 earned nearly $71 billion.
  • The medical establishment (hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, medical device manufacturers, etc.) spend nearly $6 billion per year on advertising.
  • Pharmaceuticals and medical equipment ranked third and fourth, respectively, in terms of profits as a share of revenue.
  • From 2000-2007, the annual profits of America’s top 15 health-insurance companies increased from $3.5 billion to $15 billion.
  • The 50 largest nonprofit hospitals or hospital systems made a combined net income (profit) of $4.27 billion in 2006, nearly eight times more than five years earlier.

Facts About Medical Malpractice:

Much has been made of the effect of medical malpractice jury awards, settlements, and rising premiums on the cost and quality of health care. However, there is little evidence establishing conclusive links. Meanwhile, medical malpractice premiums continue to increase at a rate that puts economic pressure on practitioners. The question is, does this influence outcomes?

  • A new Dartmouth study suggests that medical malpractice jury awards and settlements are not responsible for raising insurance premiums or health care costs.
  • The GAO recently found that access to care was generally not impacted by increasing cost of medical malpractice lawsuits.
  • The GAO concluded that liability laws have positive effects on doctors’ behavior, and are frequently the only means by which the consumer can hold the medical establishment accountable.
  • The Congressional Budget Office estimated that malpractice costs account for less than 2% of the national health spending.
  • There is little research to support anecdotal reports that rising malpractice costs contribute to defensive medicine creating barriers to care and reduced quality of service.

With so much information circulating about heath care in America, it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. It’s difficult to navigate these thick woods of interested party rhetoric to gain a true understanding of the system, its strengths and its weaknesses, but only then can we make a proper evaluation of the best possible changes.

The information contained in this blog was obtained from the following sources:

Beider, P. & Hagen, S. (2004). Limiting tort liability for medical malpractice. Retrieved from the Congressional Budget Office web site: http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=4968&type=0

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2007). Health care costs, a primer: Key information on health care costs and their impacts. Retrieved from: http://www.kff.org/insurance/upload/7670.pdf

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2008). Employee health benefits: 2008 annual survey. Retrieved from: http://www.kff.org/insurance/7672/index.cfm.

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, (2005). Background brief: Medical malpractice policy. Retrieved from: http:/www.kaiseredu.org/topics_im.asp?id+226&imID+1&parented+59

National Coalition on Health Care. (2009). Facts about health care: Economic costs fact sheets. Retrieved from: http://www.nchc.org/facts/economic.shtml

Rowland, D. & Hoffman, C. (2009). Health care and the middle class: More costs and less coverage. Retrieved from he Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation web site: http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/7951.pdf

Work-Life Balance: Good for Workers, Good for Business

Featured Guest Blogger October 26th, 2009

Cindy Krischer Goodman writes a weekly column called “The Balancing Act” that appears in The Miami Herald and is distributed to more than 40 other newspapers on the McClatchy Newswire. Her column explores the conflicting demands of balancing a career and personal life. She also is a contributor to MomsMiami.com, writes a blog called The Work/Life Balancing Act and maintains a website, TheWorkLifeBalancingAct.com. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

Most of us moms and dads have known intuitively that getting the flexibility we need at work makes us loyal to our employers. Let us leave early on Fridays and we’ll work even harder the rest of the week. Now a new report shows that businesses benefit financially from helping their employees achieve work-life balance.

New research by Morgan Redwood, an expert in talent development, reveals that businesses that help staff achieve a good work-life balance enjoyed net earnings per employee of 23 percent more per year than the average for those who don’t. The Morgan Redwood researchers, who surveyed 100 businesses in the United Kingdom, believe this boost in the bottom line is because better work-life balance reduces absenteeism, improves well-being, and increases productivity.

Janice Haddon, managing director of Morgan Redwood, says when companies weigh their management options, they now will have some real numbers to use to make their decisions. She calls the ability to put an actual value on work/life balance “a breakthrough moment,” adding, “Work/life balance is not a “nice to have” when we’re in a boom time. It can have a fundamental impact on the corporate performance at all times.”

What’s more, the report found that in high-performing companies, there was a recognition that the success of the business depended on the success of workers. If a manager goes out of his way to accommodate an employee, the employee will redouble their work efforts later on, the Morgan Redwood study shows.

Will employers embrace these findings? Will they realize that women and men are struggling to manage heavier workloads and negotiate family schedules and responsibilities?

This week, another interesting report surfaced, a nationwide U.S. survey released in conjunction with research on status of women by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress. The survey shows that men and women are concerned about what’s happening to families when everybody’s at work. Both genders said that they would like more help with these challenges. The recession seems to have pushed the challenges to new levels, with some parents working two part time jobs to make ends meet.

The report’s contributors also suggest nothing will change until men push for more family-friendly workplace policies that will benefit both genders. If men aren’t emboldened by their own struggles to balance work and family, there’s certainly some new ammunition in their arsenal—the bottom line.

Health Care in America: The Work-Family Effects: PART II: The American Health Care System and Families

Featured Guest Blogger October 21st, 2009

Andrew Kang is a Graduate Policy Assistant at the Sloan Work and Family Research Network. This is a continuation of last week’s entry, PART I: The Current Health Care System in America.

Ultimately, the high cost of health care is borne by families, both working and nonworking. Rising costs and inefficiencies are passed on to the consumer.

Health insurance for workers:

  • Nearly three out of four middle-income families are insured through their employers – coverage that is jeopardized by rising unemployment during the recession.
  • The recession will cause an estimated 7 million Americans to lose their health insurance coverage.  If unemployment rises to 10% (as many predict), an additional 6 million will lose their health insurance.
  • The annual health insurance premium for a family of four is $12,700 per family, an increase of 78% since 2001.
  • Health insurance premiums increased 119%, with the employees share increasing 117%, between 1999 and 2008, compared to cumulative inflation of 44% and wage growth of 29% during the same period.

What about uninsured workers?

  • Over 8 in 10 uninsured people come from working families.
  • On average, the uninsured are 9-10 times more likely to forego medical care because of cost and twice as likely to have medical debt.
  • Among all personal bankruptcy filings, the average medical debt was $12,000.  Sixty-eight percent of those people had medical insurance, and 50% of all personal bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses.
  • From January to March 2009, 44.9 million persons of all ages (14.9%) were uninsured at the time of interview, 57.7 million (19.2%) had been uninsured for at least part of the year prior to interview, and 32.1 million (10.7%) had been uninsured for more than a year at the time of interview.
  • Thirty-six percent of families living below the poverty line are uninsured.  Thirty-four percent of Hispanic Americans, 21% of Black Americans, and 13% of White Americans are uninsured.
  • Eleven million uninsured people come from the middle class, accounting for a quarter of the nation’s non-elderly uninsured.

Facts about the quality of care we receive:

  • Although nearly $2.4 trillion per year is spent on medical care, many people receive less care than they need, more care than they need, or the wrong kind of care.
  • Patients fail to receive needed services 46% of the time.
  • Patients received services they did not need 11% of the time.
  • Patients received recommended preventative care and screenings 49% of the time.

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  • Total national costs of preventable adverse medical events are estimated to be $35 billion per year.
  • There are over 250,000 hospital-acquired pneumonia cases and 23,000 related deaths every year.
  • One third of US patients reported a medical, medication or laboratory error in the past two years.

Next week:  PART III: Health Care and American Businesses

The information contained in this blog was obtained from the following sources:

Cohen, R., & Martinez, M., (2009). Health insurance coverage: Early release of estimates from the national health interview survey, January - March 2009.  Retrieved from the Center for Disease Control web site: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/insur200909.htm

Goldman, D., & McGlynn, E. (2005).  U.S. health care facts about cost, access, and quality. Retrieved from the RAND corporation web site: http://www.rand.org/pubs/corporate_pubs/2005/RAND_CP484.1.pdf

Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (2008).  Employee health benefits: 2008 annual survey, September 2008. Retrived from: http://www.kff.org/insurance/7672/index.cfm.

Himmelstein, D. U., Warren, E., Thorne, D. and Woolhandler, S. J. (2008). Illness and injury as contributors to bankruptcy. Retrieved from: http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/hlthaff.w5.63/DC1

McGlynn, E., Asch, S., Adams, J., Keesey, J., Hicks, J., DeCristofaro, A., & Kerr, E. (2003).  The quality of health care delivered to adults in the United States.  New England Journal of  Medicine, 348(26), 2681-2683.

National Center for Health Statistics. (2007).  Health, United States, 2007: with chartbook on trends in the health of Americans, 2007.  Retrieved from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services web site: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus07.pdf

Rowland, D., & Hoffman, C., (2005). The impact of health insurance coverage on health disparities in the United States: Human development report. Retrieved from the United Nations Development Programme web site:  http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2005/papers/hdr2005_rowland_diane_and_catherine_hoffman_34.pdf

Rowland, D., & Hoffman, C. (2009).  Health care and the middle class: More costs and less coverage.  Retrieved from The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation web site: http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/7951.pdf

Next week:  PART III: How the American Health Care System Affects American Businesses

The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation

Featured Guest Blogger October 19th, 2009

Brad Harrington is Executive Director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family and a research professor in the Carroll School of Management. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

This week you will likely hear quite a bit in the media about a report being published by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress called A Woman’s Nation. The goal of this undertaking has been to provide an in-depth look at the status of women in America from a number of different perspectives and across a wide range of sectors - healthcare, higher education, law, public service, policy, etc. It replicates a report that was done by Eleanor Roosevelt in the early 1960’s at the request of President Kennedy (Ms. Shriver’s late uncle.) Look for a Time cover story and extensive coverage on this week’s “Meet the Press”, “NBC Nightly News”, and “The Today Show” (for those of you in the United States) regarding the report and its findings. As part of the report, I was pleased to be the lead author, along with Professor Jamie Ladge of Northeastern University, of the chapter on women in business. We titled our piece “Got Talent? It isn’t Hard to Find” for a very simple reason. Present recession aside, we have heard for so long about the war for talent and the tremendous emphasis leading HR departments put on talent management. I often find these discussions ironic in light of the fact that there are so many talented individuals right under our noses (i.e., women) who are either lost to an organization (i.e., they leave their present employer or opt out altogether) or underutilized due to outmoded management thinking. In our chapter, we lay out six key points, none of which will be surprising to you who are so close to these issues:

  • The case for women in business is a talent management one, pure and simple. For a knowledge-based economy like ours, the numbers are truly staggering. Fifty-seven percent of all college degrees are awarded to women each year. Yet many organizations are still reluctant to make even minimal adjustments to ensure they are creating jobs that fit the needs of their “most valuable resource.” If women made up 10 or even 20% of new college graduates, one could argue that organizations don’t have to adjust to retain top talent. But modifying HR practices for 57% of new grads isn’t an accommodation, it’s common sense.
  • We have made progress on gender equity on many work fronts, but when it comes to home life women with children still contribute twice the number of hours to dependent care and domestic tasks as men do. That’s reality. So while men have increased their commitment to care giving, the “second shift” that we discussed 20 years ago is still alive and well.
  • In spite of the progress women have made in business, they are at the helm of only 3% of the Fortune 1000 companies. This means that women must continue to operate in organizational cultures that are designed by and for men. This creates a myriad of challenges for women who need to adapt to male dominated organizations and ground rules and adopt male oriented ways of operating in order to succeed. Much recent research suggests that women’s ways of leading is at least as effective as more male-oriented approaches, but unfortunately the dominant culture can easily discount new and different forms of leadership as being inappropriate simply because it does not fit pre-conceived stereotypes of how leaders should behave.
  • The highest impact actions that employers can take to help women thrive in business cost almost nothing. These include letting go of outdated mental models that suggest there is only one way to work, there is only one place to work, that a 40+ hour work week is the only model for contributing, and a standardized, rigid career path for all is a desirable norm. Rather, we should aim for highly flexible career models that can be customized to maximize the contributions of all employees, not a one-size-fits-all approach.
  • Those companies that do offer innovative and flexible approaches to work too often limit their offerings to professional and managerial staff. The case for innovation and flexibility are at least as appropriate for hourly workers who often face greater work-life challenges than salaried workers do. And in many industries, retaining this talent base is every bit as important. Hourly workers in a wide variety of businesses (think retailing, banking, restaurants, hotels, etc.) are the critical means for delivering an organization’s value proposition and provide the company’s face to the customer.
  • Finally, the United States federal government must take a more active role in developing and encouraging family friendly policies. FMLA, our great legislative triumph in the work family arena over the last 20 years, places the U.S. as one of only four industrialized countries in the world that does not by law offer paid maternity leave. Can we seriously view ourselves as world leaders in gender equality when this is the only mandated support we provide to working people with acute dependent care issues?

Not much is new to your ears here, I’m sure. But now is the time for the business community to stop debating and begin embracing the world as it really is today. The subtitle of A Women’s Nation is “This Changes Everything.” And it’s about time that it did.

What’s New in Work and Family

Karen Corday October 16th, 2009

New from the Network:

  • Please take our new poll: Compared to before the recession, has your overall (mental and physical) health improved, declined, or stayed the same? Available on our home page or blog.

National Work and Family Month at the Huffington Post:

New, free work-life content online:

Check Out Our New Statutes by Theme Product Series!

Featured Guest Blogger October 7th, 2009

Mary Curlew is a Policy Assistant for the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

The Statutes by Theme series joins our already successful Policy Briefing and Bills by Theme series. Our aim in providing this series is to give legislators and other interested groups a concise, timely, and user-friendly way to find statutes related to work and family topics such as breastfeeding in the workplace, telework, and flexible work schedules.

More specifically, this new product will:

  • highlight related statutes in one particular state;
  • make it easier to compare legislation between states; and
  • illustrate varying legislation language and content

We hope you find this new product helpful. Please take a look and let us know what you think!

Facing Up to the Consequences of Paying Lip Service to the “Work/Life” Agenda

Featured Guest Blogger October 5th, 2009

Juliet Bourke is a partner at Aequus Partners. She works with leading organizations to develop and implement organizational change strategies to promote equity and diversity, deliver training programs, and conduct workplace investigations and mediations. Juliet Bourke is also a part-time chairperson with the Government and Related Employees Appeals Tribunal, in which capacity she conciliates and determines workplace disputes. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.

I recently experienced the visceral alienation of those who fall outside the “work/family” paradigm and it brought me up short. Of course I have written about a “work/life” approach–in an effort to be inclusive–but if I am honest I probably had more of my heart in the “work/family” camp.

My wake-up call came about this way:

Last month, I was commissioned to write an on-line opinion (for a national news service) about the recently introduced “right to request flexibility” (“r2r”) laws in Australia.  Under this law, from January 1, 2010, eligible employees will have the right to request of their employers access to a flexible work arrangement.  The legislation also provides that an employer must respond in writing in 21 days and that a request can only be refused on “reasonable business grounds.”

I’m a big fan of the r2r, but I titled my opinion “Looking past a golden opportunity” to highlight some research we had conducted that found that  3 months out from the start date of the r2r, the majority of employees and managers are unlikely to be aware of their new rights. Given that the legislation provides a workable framework for transparent conversations about flexibility and evidence-based decision-making I see this knowledge gap as problematic. And that was the focus of my article–or so I thought.  What was picked up by the deluge of on-line comments was the unfairness of legislation which gives rights to some people (namely parents with children under school age, or children under 18 with a disability), and not others. For example:

  • “It’s always the breeders who take the rights. What about special consideration for those caring for aged or infirm parents or siblings or partners? When I hear ‘family friendly practices’ I want to vomit.”
  • “Those of us who choose to benefit the planet rather than selfishly pass on our own equally worthwhile genes, by remaining childfree get what? Stuff all …”

I was stunned.  I had struck a nerve, but not the one I had intended.  I had thought that readers would see the logic of a legislative starting point that was relatively narrow in nature, i.e., one that would allow employers to get used to the new regime and then lead to expanded rights over time for all carers, which is exactly what had happened in the United Kingdom.  What (some) readers saw was exclusion: working parents are in an inner circle that is deemed worthy of primary support and they are not.

It struck me that they are right.  So many of our legislative initiatives have working parents at the center, working families (e.g., those with elder care responsibilities) in the outer ring, and working “lifers” (do we even have a name for this group?) left out. This carries over into workplace policies.  We may entitle the policy “work/life”, but what we really mean is “work/family”, and what gets pride of place even in this group are “parents”.  How can we expect employees to behave in a collegiate way towards each other if our workplace practices endorse a hierarchy of “needs”?  I may have opened a can of worms here, but isn’t it time we face-up to the practical consequences of paying lip-service to the work/life agenda?

What’s New From the Network?

Karen Corday October 2nd, 2009

New from the Network:

Big news:

New, free work-life content online:

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