Unpredictable work schedules hurt families

Many employers of lower skilled workers use what is called “just in time” scheduling, which means that these workers rarely know their schedules more than a week in advance, and may not know how many hours they will work on any particular day, until that day. Some working parents may face the dilemma of either leaving their young children alone or losing their jobs. Their employers believe that such flexible scheduling is more profitable, but often fail to take into account the costs of increased turnover and lowered morale and loyalty. Research about this practice can increase businesses’ understanding of the hidden costs that stem from workers’ hardships in meeting family responsibilities

We need real part time jobs and career options.

If our economy is to obtain the maximum benefit from the millions of women trained and educated to create, produce, process, diagnose, teach, manage or advise, we need to offer options that will allow them to continue to work if they choose to have families. If women are forced to leave their jobs in order to have children, most will never recover those lost years in their careers. At the age when many men are at the pinnacles of the their careers, many women are reentering the work force with unequal experience. Providing part time options in every career track will ensure that the greatest number of working mothers are poised for leadership roles when they are done having children.

Business and government agencies could be required to incorporate part time work into the critical path of all their functions. This means that as critical projects pass through an entity, career part time workers are involved in them at all levels and are obligated to work extra time as needed to meet agreed upon objectives – similar to the demands placed on full time workers – but proportionate to their reduced schedules. Such a rule would preclude there being key channels in business, consulting or creative processes that only full time employees service. Why is this important? Without this requirement, part time workers would be marginalized as second class, now a frequent complaint of women who exercise a part time option – often called the “mommy track.” Also, it would go a long way toward reducing the resentment full time workers sometimes feel toward part time workers because of big differences in how much work intrudes into their respective personal lives.

The easiest constitutional avenue via which to increase part time is to require that businesses and governments receiving federal money offer part time work options that are sufficiently appealing to workers who want such schedules. After some time, if surveys of their full time workers reveal that more than a small percentage would actually prefer part time schedules, those employers would lose some of their federal contracts. A more ambitious plan would enact a tax on businesses that fail to offer attractive part time options.

A start in this direction is the Working Families’ Flexibility Act, first introduced in Congress in 2007 and co-sponsored by Senators Kennedy, Clinton and Obama. Still awaiting passage, it would require employers to consider workers' requests for reduced or flexible hours and is modeled after similar successful laws in the U.K. and other European nations. The gold standard is in Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, which require employers to provide part time options with no preconditions.