 We're going to get started now. All right, well, thanks everybody for coming. My name is Bridget Tulfi, and I'm the director of the Better Life Lab here at New America. This is our work life gender equality and social policy program where we look at the structural and cultural barriers for men and women to have real full lives at work and at home and what we do about it. So this is what we're going to explore today. Flexible work has been around, well, it just depends on the context, I suppose. People who have been able to work flexibly or control their hours has sort of depended on which type of work you did through the years, through the centuries, if you will. If you had a lot of power and autonomy, you pretty much were able to control your schedule. And if you were kind of on the lower end of the spectrum, if you were a factory worker, you didn't have a whole lot of control. If you were a farmer, you were sort of controlled by the weather. But what we're talking about in this more modern context in our work lives now, flexible work sort of came into vogue in the 1990s. And one of the reasons why is a lot of companies were looking at their workforces. And they would see that in the entry level positions, there would be fairly equal numbers of men and women. But then you got 5, 10, 15 years out, and they were losing a lot of really high-skilled talented women. And so you had firms, it was really the financial services firms, professional services firms like EY, KPMG, and Deloitte that really started looking at this and made some of the very first accommodations, if you will, to flexible work, mainly to try to keep women, highly skilled women in the workforce, because they were coming up against expectations for long work hours while they still had very heavy caregiving responsibilities. And in a sense, that worked. The attrition rates, they did drop. But then the question now becomes, so are we there yet? Has flexibility really gotten us to gender equality? And the answer is no. And yet Claudia Golden, who's a Harvard economist, she argued a couple years ago that flexibility was really the key to gender equality in the workplace. So that's what we're going to explore today. Is it the solution? When is it the solution? When is it a problem? Because we're also learning that flexible work can lead to longer work hours in certain settings. It can lead to unpredictability and chaos in other settings. So maybe flexible work isn't always the right answer. And in that case, what is? So that's what we're going to be exploring today. And hopefully we'll come away with a better understanding of the problem and an action plan for what we do about it. So we're going to start off with the current reality. And we've got someone on the line from North Carolina. We've got Talanda Barnett. She's a child care teacher in Durham, North Carolina. She's got an associate degree. She's been a child care teacher for 25 years. And she's going to talk about her story, about what having an inflexible schedule has meant for her and her work life. Do we have Talanda on the line? Yes, I'm here. All right. So Talanda, can you tell us your story and what does flexible work mean for you? And what's working and what's not in your life? My name is Talanda Barnett. I'm a child care teacher from Durham, North Carolina. I would like to first thank the Better Life Lab in New America for giving me the opportunity to speak about on this important issue and for hearing the perspective of a child care teacher. Care for and educating our young teachers, learners, is important work. And for all of us in this field, the struggle for respect and appreciation is our goal. We need to resist in a system that helps parents afford the quality of care they need while making sure that teachers like me are paid a little wage and have the ability to form a union. Now for my story and why I'm talking to you today. I take care of other children in order to provide for my own children who are now 7, 13, and 19 years old, as well as two nieces, both 16 years old. Despite working in child care for 25 years and obtaining an associate's degree in early childhood development and a business administration certificate in early childhood development, I'm still only paid $11 an hour. I was even only for a time. It's a daily struggle to get by. And I was recently forced to take another job outside of child care because the low wages and insensible schedules were just too much for my family to handle. Even with all the challenges, I hope to return to child care as a teacher still. And I am actively in search of employment in the industry that I love. As I said before, scheduling flexibility was one of the reasons I was forced to leave my previous child care job. I took a temporary position as a janitor because I had to open and close my daycare center without any relief or under normal circumstances. This will be OK. What am I supposed to do with my own children's school calls and tells me that they are sick and I need to come pick them up? Am I supposed to get them? How am I supposed to get them from after school activities? It was so stressful because I had to make other arrangements or had to take time off without pay. I simply cannot afford to make those choices. Furthermore, I was not able to leave. I was not able to leave my center during lunch, which only added to my stress. My work environment was clearly not conducive for a single mother. I'm also balancing social work visits for my two adopted nieces, foster parent classes, and not to mention the daily schedule of taking care of five children without any modifications to my schedule. It breaks my heart when I'm not able to get for my own kids, plus the stress and effects of child care I can provide at the center. My final straw was one of my children's school and I had to pick them up. When I called my manager, he told me that I wouldn't need to find someone else to send to my child because he refused to let me leave. That's when I decided that my children's well-being was more important than my love for child care. Overall, I want to see a child care culture where we can earn sick day, mental health day, personal day, even if you are not sick. Sometimes you just need a mental health day to recharge a battery. Right now, the only thing you earn is vacation time. But that isn't until a year after you are there. 365 days after you start, you are not occurring days during that time. If a child care teacher had a union, we could earn sick days, personal days, mental health days. With a union, we could occur a vacation during probationary periods because we know what we need as a child care teacher and we would be equal. Now we are just left to the whim of who makes the rules and our families are impacted by those rules. We must do more to support the people that are passionate about child care work. And flexible schedules, the ability to join a union, and more work-wise balance would go a long way to keeping people in the child care field. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you so much, Talanda. So what I want to do is turn to our panel. Let me first introduce the panel and we'll begin our conversation. So sitting next to me is Dr. Hee Jung Chang. She's a reader in sociology and social policy at the University of Kent. And she's the principal investigator of work autonomy, flexibility, and work-life balance project. And she's also been quoted several times this week. We're running the Flexibility Week on our Better Life Lab channel on Slate. So she's been sort of the star of many articles. So we're grateful for your research. We have next is Jennifer Swanberg. She's a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. She's the director of the Work Family and Well-Being Research Group there. And has done amazing work on working conditions very much like Talanda is talking about. And we're going to get to that in a minute. Next to Jennifer is Manar Morales. She is the president and CEO of the Diversity and Flexibility Alliance. And then Carrie Gleason, who's the director of the Fair Work Week Initiative and the Center for Popular Democracy, CPD Action. All right. So we've heard the current reality. So Talanda is talking about this incredibly intensive job with no schedule flexibility, not a lot of policies that support her really low wage and how time is really, in addition to all these other stressors, not having time off, not having that flexibility to go if her children are sick. I've got parent-teacher conferences this afternoon. I'm able to go because I can make flexibility work for me, but for someone in a position like that, they can't. So Manar, in your work, you deal with the current reality of flexibility on the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, if you will, with more white collar, highly skilled jobs. What are you seeing, or what's the current reality of flexibility in that instance? Yeah. It was interesting because you started talking about kind of accounting firms and consulting firms where the push for policies started and where we're sitting is looking at what is happening in companies. And policies is not the issue. They all have these great-looking policies. It's not about the policies. Where we're seeing the issue is around implementation. So it's great that they have the policies. And I think that's why you're not really seeing the full impact of flexibility because it's not about the policies. It's about whether people can actually use the policies. And so they have this sort of great paper policy that's handed out with a wink and a nod that it's career suicide if you take advantage of it. So while it's there, they're very stigmatized. And so what we're doing is working with companies at all levels to talk about how do you actually get the real benefit of flexibility and how do you create a culture of flexibility within your organization so people feel comfortable to actually use the policies that you have. Let me ask you a little bit more about that. Back up a little bit. Why have flexible policies? So they're not implemented well. Is that because they don't work or there's not much of a benefit or that they don't believe there's a benefit? Or what's the, what's the whole thing? Yeah, I think it's a lack of traction of actually understanding that this is, that there's a real business benefit. I mean, for us when we go in, we're really actually talking about the business case, that this is not about being nice and it's certainly not about an accommodation, right? Because the minute you start to approach it from this accommodation, it automatically becomes stigmatized. So versus the fact that you actually, as a company, get a real business benefit from having a policy that people actually use. There's a benefit on productivity. There's an increase in productivity. There's a benefit to recruitment. There's a benefit in terms of advancement and retention. There's a link to all of that. So if you actually look at what those business benefits are, you as a company will be encouraging it. And we talk a lot about at the Alliance, it's not just about one size fits all, right? It's about holistic flexibility. How do you make sure that you create a culture of flexibility so you're getting that benefit at all different stages within your companies and you're not just talking about reduced hours, but you're talking about telecommunications, you're talking about forms of full-time flex that people can be using in order to increase their productivity, in order to increase using it as a retention tool. That otherwise, I certainly in my own personal story, I started out as an employment litigator, I would have left had I not been able to work part-time and continue and in my first experience, part-time was not an option. And so obviously from my perspective, I had an opportunity, I was privileged to be able to step back and find an opportunity to go in at a part-time basis. Obviously not a lot of people have that opportunity, but I otherwise would have left. So telling companies to look at all your regrettable losses, how much is talent walking out the door? How much is that costing you who would have otherwise stayed had you just offered a form of flexibility? Regrettable losses. So Hee Jung, talk a little bit about sort of the, give us the big picture of what's going on. Why would businesses tolerate regrettable losses? Why would other organizations or businesses put someone like Talanda through what seems like real living hell? Why are we doing this? What's going on? Well, before I go, I think I just wanted to kind of repeat what an artist said. So business, I think they don't understand the full extent to which how flexible, and not just like part-time work, but having workers a bit more, giving workers more control over where and when they work has huge implications for recruitment. For example, women are able to stay in employment, they are able to maintain their jobs, maintain their hours. The cost of the leaky pipeline having women leave their positions due to childbirth costs all society a huge amount of money. And it is something that I think employers don't quite understand yet is one of the reasons. The other thing is I think there is some flexibility and I think surprisingly there is flexibility, but then you have to think about what kind of flexibilities are being used at the moment. And it's what we consider like there are two types to kind of like somewhat the good, which is more to really facilitate both life balance. The other is to actually kind of induce more performance outcomes. So what we find is that at the moment it's still the very high and high skilled workers that get that flexibility. It is a lot of the male-dominated men that get it. And it's the reason for that flexibility isn't what Manar was saying or what was said before. It was really about to induce like increased work intensity. Some of the things that we find based on German data, but also the UK data is that when people are given these types of flexibility, they tend to actually work longer and harder, which could actually reduce work-family conflict. And this is why sometimes in the more systematic review, which looks at all sorts of different studies, show that sometimes this flexible working doesn't work because you end up with this kind of workers working all the time and everywhere. And why do people do that? Even sometimes some of the family-friendly flexibility. And it's because we're still kind of in the society where we have this ideal worker norm where you shouldn't, at the workplace, be shown as someone who has any other responsibility outside of work that you are fully committed and working flexibly just deviates from that image. So on one hand you have these hiring workers who do have that flexibility, but it ends up actually making work expand and encroaching upon their family time. And on the other hand, the lower wage workers don't get that flexibility. Again, I think this has a lot to do with the trust issues, but also what employers don't get is that even with the low wage sectors, you will get incredible amounts of benefits and profit out of providing that flexibility, but that kind of message hasn't trickled down or hasn't been really accepted because it is perhaps seen as, they're much more replaceable and then you can easily just find new workforce to replace some of the workforce that we just talked about. So yeah, there is, again, in the current context, there's these two kind of problems where on one hand, workers who really do that flexibly can't have access, workers who do have that flexibility are not able to truly use it for the purposes that they really need to. It's interesting, one of the reports that you were a part of that I was just reading, you talked about the German context. And now here's a country that has really generous family-friendly policies in the way that the United States does not and yet they still have a culture that, as you say, tends to favor breadwinner, homemaker kind of gender norms. And so can you talk a little bit about what you found there when it came to pay? I thought that was very interesting that men and women both worked longer hours when they got flexible schedules, but only men ended up benefiting financially from that. Talk about that. So I said that, yeah, it's very unfair. So what we find is that, so again, I said that the flexibility is not necessarily given by the employers for the purposes of work-life balance, like in their heads it's about, for example, if I let this worker work from home, they'll give me back the extra hours that you cut down from commuting or preparing, going into jobs so it's that you get overtime longer over 10 hours. And that's what we found in the German data where we tracked workers when they changed from fixed schedules to more flexible, having more control over their work, they increased up to two hours more overtime per week. Now, if you compare men and women, because a lot of women in Germany were part-time, you do see a difference, but if you only compare full-time working men and women, the increase of overtime is approximately the same. Even full-time working mothers. Now the interesting thing from there is that the German men got this incredible income premium when they worked flexibly, so because their employers have this idea, oh, you're gonna start working harder and longer, and they do, they got more income in the year. Whereas women didn't, and even mothers, they didn't even get the compensation they should have gotten for the overtime hours they put in. Now why is that the case? And again, if you think about the overall picture, it has to do with the negotiation power of the worker, but also the cultural ideas about the worker and our stigmatized idea about the mother. So in Germany, mothers are expected to be at home, and that they expect these mothers to have used the flexibility, not for increasing performance outcomes, but for work-family issues, so they're almost trading off additional income for that flexibility. And that's something which we consider like, if done wrong, flexibility could actually end up even traditionalizing our labor markets. But again, that is not to say it is bad, but it's just that we need to change some of the social context in which it is being used to enable flexible working, to really be something useful and beneficial for our workers. I wanna come back to that because you've done some interesting work on the international context, but Jennifer, I wanna go to you. So we heard Talanda's story, you've done an awful lot of work on the experience of low-wage workers. And here we're talking about these cultural norms, these gender norms, and yet they operate very differently in the low-wage sector, don't they? Very much so. And when we think about workplace flexibility, and for most of us in the room, we think about the terms that you've been using, having day-to-day flexibility, being able to work from home, but those types of policies and practices do not map on to low-wage work and the structure of low-wage work. So we have to kinda step back and think, okay, the studies that you were talking about back in the early 90s when workplace flexibility first came about, well, why it came about was because companies were trying to help women with their temporal aspects of work-family conflict. So if you apply that concept to low-wage work, you say, okay, so what is it about time that creates conflict for workers in low-wage positions, particularly in the service sector? And it's really about them not having control over their hours, and it's also that they don't have the number of hours they might wanna work. And then when they do, they're very unpredictable and unstable. And this is a trend that has occurred over the last 10 to 15 years as a lot of these low-wage industries have moved towards something called just-in-time scheduling. And this is where firms will map their schedules and the number of hours that they're assigned based on the demand of the customer. So for retail, that might be the flow on the floor or sales in restaurants. It might have to do with, again, customer demand or the number of, in hospitality, the number of rooms that are rented or reserved. There we go. So as a consequence, what we see is that a significant number of low-wage workers don't have the number of hours that they would like to work. We see anywhere between 40, depending on which study you look at, anywhere between 40 and 70% of low-wage workers have unpredictable work hours, which is they don't know they get their schedule within less than seven days' notice. Or they might be asked to come in at the last minute or the number of hours that their work might be reduced at the last minute. We see an equal amount of employees have unstable hours. And this is where there's a lot of volatility in the number of hours that they might work from week to week and what hours they may be assigned to work, like when their schedule is. So it's very difficult to plan for childcare or elder care or even being able to continue your education or anything like that. And then finally, workers don't have access. So they just don't have meaningful input into what schedule they might work. And when I did a study on retail workers in an organization that we called City Sales, a national retailer, what we tried to get them to think about was if you could give your workers meaningful input higher for the shift that they might work. So if we're one employee, working nights might be the best for them or someone else working days might be better. And what we find in the same way that there's a lot of negative ramifications of these policies and practices and strategies in the low wage sector, if you give workers stable, predictable work hours, they're more likely to retain the workers, there's better health outcomes. And likewise, when workers have more inconsistent work hours, there's high turnover. So there is a kind of a business case for rethinking the way kind of low wage, kind of the trends in which we see low wage work happening specifically around hours. It's not impossible to give this kind of flexibility. If you look at, say, nurses, I mean, that's not a low wage job, but that's also shift work. And there are many places where nurses can bid for certain hours or swap different shifts. So it's not that it's impossible to do, is it? No, it's not impossible to do. And I think the issue is, is that firms have transferred the kind of costs, labor costs onto the workers, as opposed to kind of absorbing the labor costs. So what they're trying to do is kind of reduce their labor costs. They don't want workers on the floor if there's not customers. So in the same way that we have to kind of rethink gender norms, you know, I think what I think about when you talk, He Joong, is that these are gendered organizations. And I think what's happened is that, you know, these are companies that would rather have higher profits than really create better practices for the employees. You know, talking about gender, women make up the largest proportion of low wage workers, right? So, and many of them are single mothers. So they're really, we talk about a double burden. So let's shift to Carrie. So you're here, you know, we've got people who are, you know, researching it and Minara is working on her end to try to shift it in the highway sector. Talk about what you're doing to try to really shift this in the low wage sector. Yeah, well, you know, there's been this movement growing for a fair work week and it's really been taking off. You know, I think there's been new space opening up in cities and states across the country, places that have passed the minimum wage, have passed her in sick time. And I think there's this recognition that, you know, most Americans are actually paid by the hour. And the data shows people don't have enough input and our work weeks are ever changing, right? We see it both in salary jobs, but when you get down to the hourly reality, it increases income instability on top of intense family strain. And so it's been a natural next step for policy makers in cities and states to say, well, what do we do about this problem? And so we've seen since 2014, six cities have passed some kind of new law to update the protections on today's work week. In August, Oregon became the first state to pass comprehensive scheduling protections for retail, food service and hospitality workers, including the right to request a flexible schedule. And so it's been this interesting moment right now where, you know, we see actually the people in this country who are paid the least, but actually are kind of at the forefront of this movement to get this standard that all of us really need. And, you know, at this point, we have, you know, both New Hampshire and Oregon have right to request Seattle, San Francisco and the city of Emeryville also have the right to request a flexible schedule. And in some places, like, I think New Hampshire might be the only state that is universal and most, New Hampshire and San Francisco in many places is the sectoral strategy. And so I think there's this, in some ways, we're in the early stages of this movement despite how fast it's growing, where the conversation is starting with the people who are in the front lines of America's growing service economy, and there's this opportunity to expand the conversation in this way that we all can connect with of like, do we have enough say in our work weeks? Do we have control on how much and when we work? And what are the ways in which technology is kind of bleeding in to work into the rest of our lives? I think that's something we can all relate to. So interesting that you're talking about. So for the longest time, when we talked about flexibility, we thought about it in this kind of 1990s context for sort of highly skilled women. So when did you start seeing that, you know, the argument is getting bigger, that it's becoming more of a universal argument, even though it operates differently for different workers, but it's a problem and a solution for everybody. Yeah, I mean, it's this interesting moment. I've been to a lot of these conversations about flexibility, where there's employers in the room, and when they talk about flexibility, it's like, well, is somebody willing to step up at the last minute to do this thing, this last, you know, like, it's actually about like, random overtime. Or whether or not you're willing to do the scramble from one week to the next, and when workers say they want flexibility, it means like, can I actually say, you know, look, can you give me some stability in my hours, or can you accommodate my second job, or school, or like the fact that I have to pick up my kid at this time. And what we found is that there's actually a culture of retaliation that people in the service economy experience, where it's like, yes, you can request that time off, and maybe I'll give it to you, but you'll never see that shift in your schedule again. Like, there is just this, there's a cost that the people in the service sector know, when you step up and ask for a request, there might be a price that you paid in terms of income. And so that's what is so powerful about the right to request policies, is that it requires a protective, interactive conversation. It doesn't require employers to give a flexibility, but it means that they can't actually deliver negative consequences to people when they request the flexibility. Yeah, Hee-chan. Well, just to kind of bring in the European perspective. So the European Commission at the moment is actually trying to implement right to request flexible working at a European level. So all your, yeah. And one interesting thing I want to mention is that they also tie it in with the protection of workers, because if you can't have a right to request, essentially saying, can I work flexibly and they're just, you know, like, completely having a cold day, like a deaf ear, like, and this is what happens in the UK. Now to say that nothing has happened, the UK introduced this law in 2003, one of the first countries to have introduced it legally, but it's a right to request with no clear obligations for the employers to actually justify why they reject it. The only real way to take this further is to go to tribunal, right? From 2003 to 2016, 2016 when they actually allowed this right to request for all people. So at first it was the parents, but then now it's now all workers have this right. The increase of flexible working has, there has been almost no increase. There's been a stagnation. The reason for that is because of retaliation and the stigmatization that we're just talking about, because when you have that flexibility, it might be rejected anyways, but when you have it, then it's gonna have career consequences. It might, you might actually have really bad, kind of working relations with your colleagues because of the idea that flexible workers make work for other people. Now, so the kind of the opposite, not the opposite, but kind of a contrasting example to that is the Dutch case. So the Dutch only had the right to adjust working hours, which means to reduce our increased hours, which is now in defense 2015 being changed into right for flexible work. Again, it's a right to request, but the difference is that the workers have much more of a right to request given that the employers then have to make a justification on business cases or exactly why it can't be taken up. So in this case, and you have to also understand in the legal system where the Dutch workers have much more of a right, the Dutch unions are strong, they negotiate with employers on the national level, there's a really good collective bargaining protection, wages are high, unemployment is low, but generally Dutch workers do get that right as a right. So for the US, for the right to request flexible working, for this to really make sense, just as the European Commission has done, you have to bring it in, tie it in with the protection of workers, not those who work flexibly but also who request it so that they do not fear any job insecurity due to that, that it will be legally unfair or it will be going against the labor laws to fire someone because they work flexibly or give them unfair schedules, et cetera. Otherwise, you get this kind of stigmatization where the workers, despite having the right, will not be able to really access it. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, go ahead and then I'll ask my question. I was just gonna add on that, too, is around what we're seeing in professional services and what we're doing with certainly companies that we're working with is to say, it has to be reasoned neutral because what we wanna shift away from, too, is that this falls under your women's initiative and it's all about retaining women and advancing women, whereas in order for flexibility to work, it has to be de-parented, de-gendered, and de-stigmatized. And so moving away from this is a women's issue and this is the way in which we can retain more women to this is everybody wants flexibility and we buy into the business case behind flexibility, therefore it shouldn't matter why you wanna use it, right? It's just, it matters about how you can get your work done. The reasons you wanna do it shouldn't matter. Two, I just wanna touch upon, that while we're working with companies, we're also very clear that when you implement flexibility in your companies, it has to be across the board, that so if you take a law firm example, you create a really stigmatized environment in which you say, oh, the attorneys can work flexibly, but the staff can't, right? So we're talking about the fact that it might look different, right? It might be somewhere where if you have a receptionist, maybe they're not telecommuting, maybe that's not available, but job sharing or shifting the time that you start and stop is available so that you look at this sort of holistic flexibility and say across the board and the company, how do we create a flexible work environment so everybody benefits? I was gonna ask and I'll just throw this out to all of you. So I'm hearing, you know, Kerry, you're talking about retaliation and punishment. Keith Young, you're talking about stigma. You know, Manar, you're talking about the business case. You know, what is the case for not working flexibly? If there are all of these sort of punishments and stigma around flexibility, you know, what's the argument not to do it? It's just that that's the way we've always done it or kind of what's really holding that back? Why are companies not doing, I mean, I think in terms of, they fear that people are not gonna perform, right? So the question we always get, well, how are we gonna know whether somebody's performing if I don't see them in the office? It's the old world, thank you. You're very much old world, but we're still stuck in that ideal worker mentality where, right, they don't see the person there so they don't think that they can do their work rather than they need to move toward accountability for their performance, like results-based accountability, you know, as opposed to hours. Right, and that's always my response to that, right? Is that, well, how do you know they're working when they're there? Because right now, let's not be fooled, right? We have access to technology, we're at our desk, I mean, they could be shopping, they could be doing lots of different, they could be looking for their next job, right? If you look at the studies of how many people are in the office looking for their next job, right? You don't know that they're actually working. So you have to think about that, whether they're sitting in front of you or they're at home, how do you judge when somebody's working and performing? It's the same way. So Jennifer, how does that translate in the low wage setting? You know, so that the face time is very much that ideal worker kind of norm that you have to be, you know, in the office and putting in all of those late night hours or working all the time. But in the low wage sector, sort of what keeps, what's the argument for having, continuing to have that chaos or unpredictability? Is that all about power really? Well, that's a good question. I think power and money, because I think if you, in the firm's mind in certain industries, they think about how to reduce labor costs. They don't think about the human impact on that. Some firms do, but the majority, large majority, don't. So there is both kind of firm policies and one of the things that I talk about when it comes to flexibility is the important role of the supervisor, the direct supervisor. So it's oftentimes the supervisor, if you get a supervisor who kind of understands these issues, who may begin to give somebody flexibility in terms of giving them a fixed schedule or they know that on Thursdays they pick their child up at piano lessons, so therefore we don't schedule her. But that takes a certain amount of understanding and kind of new world thinking. And oftentimes the middle managers or the supervisors receive absolutely no training on how to manage people. So when I think about implementation of workplace flexibility across the board, we have to hit the middle managers and the supervisors around educating them, assuming you have the culture that wants to support it or not. Sometimes the middle manager can make a difference in that way. That's so interesting. Yeah, I think there's like two points I'd like to raise. I mean, one is just to build off of this dialogue. So we just, open availability is the expectation that you have to be available for available work schedule. And that's when employers, when they talk about flexibility, that's what they're actually talking about. I wanna be able to schedule whenever I need you. And the algorithms are set up that way. It's not just the managers have it in their brains. Are you gonna be flexible? Which means like are you gonna be there when I need you, when I need you? But the algorithm is the same thing. People will say, well, why am I not getting enough hours? Well, if you open up your availability, then you can get more hours. And so there's just this pressure and that is the condition for advancement and what parent do you know is open availability, right? And so it is a part of this expectation for flexibility is exactly to your point is that it creates this culture that actually holds back the opportunity for equitable pathways for advancement. There is kind of, I would love for us to like talk about kind of what the future of work is and what this means as we see the growth of app-based technologies. And I don't know if I should. Yeah, yeah. I think so. These are rough as my next thing. Okay, so we just surveyed a thousand people working in the retail economy. We'll be releasing a report in a few weeks. And we talked to some people who worked at Amazon. We talked to this one woman who does customer service from Amazon at home. She also drives Uber. She works alone. She doesn't know her co-worker. She doesn't have a boss. It's just she works alone. And when you think about like what it means in terms of, so that's one thing that's happening is people are working alone, who are working flexible. But then what we're seeing is the growth of these shift swapping apps, which is like the technology of flexibility, right? You can trade a shift, you can pick up a shift. And it's common in home healthcare, but it's the retail companies are looking at it, trying to figure out do we adopt it? Does it make sense for us? And the next version of that is apps that basically credential people and then allow people to work across multiple employers. So maybe I'll work at Home Depot, Macy's and the Gap. So that's really flexible. You can pick up a shift whenever you want. You can work as many hours or as little hours as you want. But when we think about all the other things that actually make a good job, there's zero pathway to actually start to have that dialogue with your employer about whether or not you like are getting advancement or a promotion or a raise or benefits or access to family leave. Like it does erode that flexibility, that pathway to flexibility, erodes the kind of stability that we know actually makes a good job. Looked at the international context. One of the things that I've been looking at as we talk about the rise of independent work and contract work, digital and platform work, gig work, as the future of work is coming. And you look at some of the places where that's already happened, like say in Japan where they have moved more toward contract work starting in the 1980s, that kind of lifelong employment kind of started to erode. And there you've got people who basically are working themselves to death. There was just somebody who just Karoshi who just worked herself to death. And so that's as we look at the future of work and the ability to have some say or control over the hours that you work so that you don't literally become a work slave and die from working, what's to prevent that from happening here? I think a lot of people talk about independent works or like Uber and kind of like quasi self-employment but not quite because you are tied into this kind of larger multinational kind of corporation as an employer or a laser source database. Is that, it's not, like people have this notion that oh people go into there because it gives you flexibility and control. It doesn't, it actually isn't. And the reason why people go in there a lot is because the other jobs are not giving people the enough flexibility and the autonomy to adapt to a lot of the, quite a number of diverse issues that people might be childcare, might be elderly care combined together as a standard generation. A whole range of other things, education but also all sorts of other things. And we shouldn't be falling into this trap of the independent work being a solution. That's absolutely not. And we need to really think about how to protect it as you say because it just does not, it rose the employer-employee relationship to the point where it's, employees won't have any say in the matter. But I mean, I think in the future, the problem is that we have all of these kind of arrangements coming out of the independent work but also flexible work, everything. And these are all great but you have to take a step back and look about the context. Again, where are we now in terms of worker? As a global status, most countries, most workers have now declined and collect the negotiation power. Trade unions are low. Individuals workers are increasingly losing their rights as workers that were once protected by labor laws but other sorts of kind of protective systems. We have, on the other hand, a lot of increased competition globally to become the best and we almost are considered as entrepreneurs of your own destinies. Perhaps U.S. probably more than some of the other European countries where there is still a bit of protection left. And in those contexts, these arrangements could actually really result in very, very bad outcomes. And it's, on one hand, so we need to really make sure that the governments provide very protective legal mechanisms to allow for, flexibility can be awesome. I think, so in general, a lot of people criticize me saying, oh, so do you don't want flexibility? It's like, no, absolutely. People are increasingly going to be needing that. We talk about gender, but I think both men and women, different age groups across the life courses for various reasons, we're going to be needing that flexibility. If we as a society take a step back and look at it in a slightly longer perspective, and this is, I think, kind of addressing why managers don't use it, it's because managers can't at the moment take a longer perspective of how best to use this worker. If they take that longer perspective, it's so clear that you do want this worker to have the autonomy because that worker will be happier, healthier, will provide much higher profits in the longer term. But we just, employers don't see that, do they? But I mean, you know, this is, it's not just them, but it's because of the social context. And also ourselves as workers, we sometimes don't get to see, and this is why Karosha happens because on the short term, you're just kind of chasing the next one and then going into that rat race of working harder and more, and then again with the technology, it has almost become too easy to do that. And we're forming this cultural normative where you need to be working all the time everywhere to almost be seen as someone who is even half serious about their jobs, even in the lower sectors, I think. And that's something we need to kind of step back and be like, oh, okay, what are we doing? And collectively, let's think about this and really think about how best to serve our society, ourselves, our families, our rental companies, and what needs to be done about it. And that is the perfect place where I want to ask each of you, all right, what is the action agenda? If we're really going to turn flexibility from a problem into a solution, you know, in whatever context that it appears in the workplace, whether it's low wage, high wage, future or gig stuff, what needs to happen? What's our action agenda? And then we'll turn it over to the audience for questions. Who ever wants to start? I'll let you boil it down to like one or two or three bullet points then. What do we need to do? So legal protection, the right to request flexible working should be right through flexible working with legal consequences for like employers who may not necessarily who reject it. And so that's the legal. And then there could be more to be done by providing workers with more support. I think there needs to be more campaigns and also just training because there's so much as an academic, there's just so much literature out there showing the benefits of flexible working, giving people a ton and giving people the break to be able to balance work with family life. It seems like it's completely lost in the real world, like where it's just leaking. And even if it is being delivered, it isn't actually being delivered to a way where employers really understand what this is about. So I mean, when ours, you're doing incredible service for everyone to actually get that message across. And I mean, I think what we also have to do as workers, as individuals to think about ourselves, not just as workers that really can be, I mean, we shouldn't be ashamed of us being a very multidimensional person who's not just a worker, but I'm a mother, I'm a wife, I'm a daughter. And I'm also a singer and I like to dance Zumba. And why can't I bring all of that into the workplace and be able to share it? Because all of those aspects are actually making me a better worker, but I'm not just a worker. I contribute as into society, as a mom, in terms of, for example, father spending time with their children or mother spending time. It has to do with child development, which will actually benefit society in the longer run. Me dancing Zumba will benefit society by, and this is not a joke, by not being reliant on the healthcare system. This is so important, but we never think of it and we never say it. And this is something to dialogue, so we need to start bringing out into the workplace and this multidimensional person, so to say. Talk about Zumba will actually make you a better worker, but that's actually true. Some of the other work that we're doing, I see Dan Conley with ideas42, we've been doing some really interesting work, kind of looking at our work culture and some flexibility and health and kind of overwork, work-life conflict and how to make that better. And one of the startling things that in looking at the literature, the way we work now, simply the way we work, not as a coal miner or OSHA falling off a ladder, just the way we work, long hours, late night emails and predictability is actually now the fifth leading cause of death in the United States, that long work hours are associated with 120,000 excess deaths a year and healthcare costs that rival diabetes. So when we talk about the business case has not been made, it has over and over again, it just doesn't seem to be harkened or listened to. So Jennifer, what do we need to do to get people to listen and change? I don't know about that, but I think in terms of the action agenda, I would like us to see for the low-wage workers is that we go back to somehow figure out a way to go back to giving workers a livable wage and a stable schedule that they can rely on because it goes back to help to reduce stress, it'll give them lower parental stress, make them happy and it kind of goes back to kind of Zoom but I'm making them a better person. I also think that you mentioned training Hujung, that's right. We have to train supervisors and middle managers about what is work-family conflict, what are the ways in which we can modify workplace practices to support workers in both their work and family life and have it be a positive outcome. I think there also needs to be kind of this, we have to continue to de-gender the workplace and get senior leaders to recognize that flexibility, all these sorts and similar benefits are it's the right thing to do from a business perspective, it's not just a woman's issue. And then I also think that as individuals, I think especially for the professional workers, there's a lot of job insecurity that people don't talk about and that might be driving some of the overwork because so many of us have seen people get laid off and not be able to get jobs after the 2008 recession that we have to kind of rethink the meaning of work in our lives and start to kind of push back a little bit at the organizational level in terms of the culture of overwork and do we really need to be emailing late at night, what does that really do in terms of the work product? Yes, as a late night emailer, my team is sort of like, yeah, so I've got that brilliant idea and I was like maybe not so brilliant if we could just wait until the morning to send it. So, Minar, what do we need to do? I mean, to be back on a lot of what was that, I mean, I really do think starting with the business case and companies, I mean, I would say to companies, you have to start with understanding why this matters to you because if you don't go by the why it matters to you, it's never gonna gain traction throughout the company and so that idea of looking at your numbers, looking at the drivers, looking at the impact of flexibility has on diversity too at the same time that you de-gender and de-parent. I really do think it's important that we de-parent the issue as well but I think having leaders understand that they have to go first, that they set the culture and so that if there are ways that they can both model some forms of flexibility but that they can also, that they can uncover too. I'm unapologetic about the fact that I have three kids and I have a husband and my family matters to me. And so that is by allowing myself to do that, I know my team will do that, I know. So if leaders can go and talk about that and talk about the fact instead of saying, oh, I have a meeting or a conflict saying, you know what, I'm gonna go to parent-teacher conference or I'm going to my kid's game and I'm doing this to allow others to feel like it's okay, goes a long way. I do think building some accountability in is incredibly important because what ends up happening is even when we always start, we say it starts at the top but it gets stuck at middle management and that's that frozen middle that if you don't hold people accountable to it, you don't in any other, if you believe in the business imperative, which is always what I say to companies first, if you believe that it's a business imperative and it's a driver of your business then any other business initiative you have in your company, you would not allow individual managers to decide whether they wanted to follow it or not. And so with flexibility, it's the same thing. You have to kind of get that middle to say that they will be held accountable for it if they don't allow individual people to use the, what you have said is acceptable as an entire company. And then finally, it goes to that training, both to train on stigma. So we talk a lot about blind spots and unconscious bias. There's a lot of unconscious bias that happens around flexibility and you have to talk about that stigma. But also, so from the super, I mean we all talked about from managers needing to know and be trained on it, but I actually think that training also has to happen at the individual who are actually taking advantage of the flexibility and are using it because it's sometimes not intuitive on how to be successful there. And then if you have somebody who does it in a way that gives it a bad name, everybody points to it, right? But that's a performance issue, but you can also train around what your expectations are. What does it look to be successful? Set standards and allow people to be successful on it is something that I think is important that we certainly work with companies on. Fascinating, Carrie. So with the Fair Work Week Initiative, we have three strategies we're moving. We're updating today's standards for the work weeks. That means for everyone, right? We have not updated our labor laws on work hours in 75 years. And when you think about the technologies that we use to create our work hours from billions of people across the globe, there's a lot of progress we need to make and so we are both moving policy change strategies, but then also engaging the people who create the technology that create our work weeks and thinking about how do we actually integrate values and metrics into the technologies that manage the time that we get to work every week. And so there's a lot of opportunity there and when we talk to those technology companies, they say, you can put in any rule into our system, the companies aren't using it, right? Or the managers will say, well, we have a good policy now, but it is very much about the implementation and how do you expect me to implement this policy if my labor budget isn't, it's being squeezed harder and harder and harder, right? So I do agree with like there is this culture change that we need to think about how do we actually overhaul how we actually think about what optimization is and actually what are the downstream costs that are actually undermining bottom lines and I think there was a lot of points made that emphasized that. So we do talk to employers as well. And then we also are pushing companies, right? A lot of what we do is developing the leadership of working on the front lines of America's service economy to tell their stories but what's really happening because there is not a single CEO in this country that will hear about the struggle that working parents face or try to keep up with the scramble today's work week that says that's okay, right? We actually all have shared values around what is a sustainable work week. The truth is though is that we're actually, we're not delivering that and a part of that is that it's individualized. Well, she's a childcare problem, right? Well, you just have to be flexible, business just picked up, right? And I think the more that we can do to actually amplify the voices, what it's like and how strange we actually really all are, we can start to create that culture change in terms of moving companies to adopt better policies, hold them accountable to comply with that policies and think about how we can actually just lift the floor for everyone. That sounds great. Well, let's go open it up for questions. We'll start in the, over on the side. Hi, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic panel. My name is Mary Madden. I'm a researcher for the Data and Society Research Institute and actually used to be a partner in residence here. And I mostly came today not for professional reasons, but personal reasons. I feel like I'm kind of exhibit A on trying to forge like a flexible work situation that works for me and my family. And yeah, it's been a path. And I am obviously in a very like, I recognize a ideal position. And even then it's been a challenge. And so I wanted to just bring up a few points. One is I wanted to echo what was said about how important I think it is to be, to set the example for your employees because I see so much in my experience, very well-meaning organizations and well-meaning colleagues who do not set that example themselves and then younger employees assume they need to follow that path in order to succeed and advance in their careers. And that's among men and women. And then also I just wanted to sort of bring up the issue and I wondered if a few of you could speak to this of sort of the unique problem of Washington, DC. And places like this where you don't necessarily, I feel like here our cultural challenge is partly informed by the fact that there is simply like no value put on work-life balance because we are dealing with global problems. We're all doing good in our work. There's endless capacity and need for, the work that we do, right? And so like that, the I guess knowledge worker jobs that have that sort of like almost like competing level of value to your work as the rest of your life, right? Do you know what I'm saying? And so anyway, so I just think that's something that sort of the nature of the work really affects the ability to have that balance. And so I just wanted to mention that since we're here in DC. I'm gonna throw that out to you guys because I have to tell you a lot of times when I'm interviewing people and I'm talking about this, they tend to equate, well, flexibility means less work. Flexibility means slacking off. Or there's this other question that's like, well, what if I really like my work? I'm just really passionate about it. What if I don't want to stop? And so kind of piggybacking on that question. I think it's not just DC. I think it's kind of everywhere. What do you think? Well, it's kind of balancing different things to different people, right? So for some people it really is 50-50. But for other people it might be, they might be fully working and barely seeing their family for a certain period of time because they've got this major project and then they take some time off. So it's really for the individual workers really thinking what does work-life balance mean to you? And how can you make that happen within the context of where you work? And if that's not possible and you can't be a change maker then you have to make some tough decisions, right? Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that. I always talk about the fact that you have to define what success looks like to you. So we don't use the term work-life balance. We talk about work-life control. I say I have a lot of work-life control. I have a lot of work-life autonomy. I probably have a lot less boundaries, which I work on as well. But I think it's really about defining what is success. So in my mind for me it's what does success look like as a life, what does success look like as a mother? What does success look like as a CEO? And I figure all of those things. But at the end of the day no one's gonna tell you to work less. So some of it is there's kind of people who are signaling and thinking like my company or my leader is somehow gonna tell me I should work less. And at some point you also have to claim your own autonomy because waiting for someone else to tell you about it isn't gonna happen. And that to-do list is never gonna end, right? I mean, if you think about it, I think about it in my own world running a company. I mean, I could have a to-do list that was endless every single day and it would never, and somebody when I started my own company said to me, you know, as an entrepreneur you should know your to-do list is never done. So if you're waiting for that to take some time it's never gonna happen. I work on average 37 and a half hours. And I can like, oh, well that's part time in the, oh, actually it's full time in the Netherlands. Although I'm in the UK so it's half way through. Actually I don't have contractual hours in my university and that is the case with academic workers and very expected as a serious academic. If you want to have a career you should be working 60, 70 hours a week. But I decided very early on when I had my child that I am going to actually follow what the behaviors are. You know, the studies have been shown that if you work that many hours you're not gonna be productive. I'm more productive because I work 37 and a half hours. I take both Saturday, Sunday off, spend time at my family or just couch and just don't do anything or go on walks because I know that I'll be refreshed. And I know that as an academic you also feel like, oh, if I work a bit harder and then there might be companies who might change or have come to this or that and that really makes societal change. But I think you could balance when you know that you only have those hours to really focus and really work hard and know that especially on the longer run perhaps it would actually be much better because I think again, just having to work 60, 70 hours it's not a very long term vision that you have especially if you think about your relationship with your partner, with relationship with your family and your children and the physical relationship with yourself and Bridget's book about overwhelm and talk about you have to have fun as well because that's gonna be crucial to your productivity in terms of productivity in the broader sense as not just work but a whole relationship, the relationship with society. And that's what I decided to do. And I mean, and I said, this is not for everybody. A lot of people won't be able to do it but I have to say I'm much more productive and actually I am much more productive and in a better position than I was when I did it. I wasn't a mom and I was working those 70 hours a week. So yeah, I will just add to that that yes, I have great flexibility and yes, I do read and write about this and the most recent piece that I wrote was it's Sunday and I'm working. So that's part of what we're, I see Terry Monahan is in here is in the audience. She taught me probably one of the smartest things I've ever heard, which is, when you talk about time management you can't manage time but you can manage your expectations and your priorities. And that I think is something that I do struggle with. My expectations tend to be very outside what I can do. And this is where I thank Dan for the work that we're doing because behavioral science now actually tells me that I'm really quite normal, thank God. That we have something called the planning fallacy. That it's just a very human thing to be really bad at estimating how long something's going to take. And so I'm taking Dan's advice here. One of the ways to deal with that is to constantly schedule some slack in your calendar so that you have some time sort of to plan for your own really bad planning. So I didn't plan very well last week so I'm hoping to plan better this week. So another question? Yeah. Hi, I just had a question about it feels like we're in a catch 22 because the people who are often needing caregiving or flexibility around caregiving don't have a platform to make a policy change about it. And so, and the people who are at the top aren't as, I'm speaking as an architect, we're 11% of the leaders of our organizations, our women. Actually, no, I'm sorry, that's licensed. The leaders are about 3%. So it's kind of, I mean, I know it's not a male-woman thing or whatever, but I feel like if women had the platform, of course caregiving would be very much part of an essential part of any hire or any sort of job. We'd be thinking about it because it's just part of our lexicon. Whereas I feel like it's just not, it's just not a business imperative for most of the people making the decisions and until they really internalize it or have someone who really, I don't know, cares about it and really gets it, will it become an imperative? It feels like a band-aid. It feels like a way to placate people to keep them and or to recruit millennials and give it some buzz. It doesn't feel real to me. It's like a truly, truly real thing. And speaking as someone who's working 30 hours a week and had to take a pick out to do it, totally worth it. But I do see it has limitations in terms of a career path. And just curious if that catch 22, no leaders to make decisions and people who really need the help don't have the platform. I think we are seeing it be real in some companies. I mean, I will say that I think there are some, certainly when we're going in to talk to some of the companies that we're seeing some real traction being made there. Not always led by women, really led by other men within. You have to have men leading some of this because the numbers aren't there to have just this fall on the shoulders of women. So making sure that men understand that. And so for us, it's about highlighting those success stories and even actually highlighting the success stories within the organizations. So that they see that this is actually working. We run a spotlight every month, the flex success spotlight, so that we're showing how it works and how it works effectively for individuals. And in terms of a path kind of making sure that one of the things that we say is if you want an effective reduced hours policy, then that can't impact. It can impact advancement proportionately, but it can't. Nobody wants to tread water, right? So if somebody is in a position and they're using flexibility and they're treading water, that's not gonna work, that becomes stigmatized. So making sure that you create that. But getting more people, I mean, I think more people and companies, and I think it's shifting around because of some of the generational trends, right? So Gen X kind of strived for workplace flexibility, but millennials demand it and they're unapologetic about it. And so I do think kind of that shifting of that conversation to say, even for the most resistant companies that were like, well, you know why I think to do with this are realizing that there's a war for talent out there. And as the leadership gap starts to happen and baby boomers retire and you just don't have enough Gen Xers to fill those positions, you have to get millennials to be coming into your organizations and to stay and to want to reach leadership positions. And so that's forcing kind of the conversation a little bit even though it can't just be about that. But it is starting to get more of a platform there. Yeah, one thing I want to say is that I agree, like it is like we need to push more women and just to get to voice it. But I think one of the things that we tend to forget is that a lot of men, it's not just millennials, but kind of slightly older men as well, have such a great demand to be more involved in the family as well. And I think at least in the UK, that's one of the growing kind of biggest population that's growing need for work-life balance. But they are the ones that are actually fear voicing that opinion most because in the companies, it's obvious a mom would want to have flexible working, but that's really kind of deviating from the world. Having said that, there is also kind of a premium you get because oh, you're a dad and you're a man and you want flexibility, good on you and we'll give you that whereas the mom she'll slack off, right? But I mean, I think just to try to get more men involved and try to get them to voice on all the positions to really be able to voice it. I mean, being kind of allies and you know, I mean, I actually joined collaborators of trying to push this change. And it isn't just the women's it is for everybody. And I think having men involved in care, there's so many different positives that will come out of that. And I don't mean just childcare, I mean elderly care also with the partner care. So I mean, this is something, I mean, we should do parallel to all of these things that we just spoken about. I was gonna say, I mean, I think when you said you're an architect working 30 hours a week, I'm sure you took a big pay cut, right? Because it's when I, the people I know are architects, especially when you're training to be an architect, a part of the training is like being a doctor, like it's just clocking a lot of hours and that. It's built into the training that you don't sleep. And so, and you know, and with nurses, there's expectation you're gonna do 60 hour shifts and you don't get, I mean, in Maryland has a lot against protecting nurses against forced overtime, right? Transportation has a lot of laws around protecting people against too long work hours. And like it is, when you think about the issues, different industries are structured in different ways and we need different protections and there's different challenges that emerge. And so I really think we need a sectoral analysis on it because not all firms are the same and the issues that come up are very different and the occupational segregation that makes it impossible to change an industry's culture is like plays out differently in different jobs. I also think when you think about the pay cut, professional women experience that pay cut when they go to flexible work weeks. But when you're paid by the hour, when we're moving all these policies that give part-time workers access to more hours. And DC, commercial janitors actually won the country's first guaranteed hours law. They have a guaranteed 30 hour work week, right? And the pushback from businesses is, well, people wanna work part-time. Well, yeah, they might wanna work part-time. Many people choose part-time work. They don't choose a pay cut and their part-time workers take a massive pay cut per hour even when they're on the clock doing the same work. And so I think starting to expose that all work is created equal. And actually in Europe, I believe that there are some policies that actually have a part-time premium when you work part-time, you actually get paid more, right? It's because, I mean, first of all, there's a legislation in most countries, but also at the EU where you're not supposed to have that discrimination hourly pay for part-time workers. And in the Netherlands, for example, the land of part-time, you have the same benefits, all French benefits, pensions you have, you go like holidays, et cetera. But what's important in the Netherlands is that because of the very progressive income tax, if you were to think about post-tax income, then your per-hourly hour, is actually part-time workers actually getting more per hour if you were to think about it. Better part-time work could be one of our solutions, right? We have pretty crappy part-time workers. I think that's a really important piece of around getting more men involved in care. One of the things that we've been doing and pushing out to our companies is went around parental leave that be gender-neutral. Now gender-neutral right now, what it means for some companies is that primary and secondary designation and re-advocate for companies that you remove that primary and secondary. It should just be care. And that equally men and women get that amount of time. Different for having the baby right that falls under a medical disability. That's not what I'm talking about, but when you're just talking about care, that that helps that move that conversation too. Yeah, Reed? Hi, Reed Cramer, New America. And I think this is a question for Kerry. And you might have just been beginning to answer it because I was interested in this revisiting of the statute of the work week, defining that. And I'm familiar with how some of the different, large companies don't wanna claim these workers as part of their workforce. They wanna be technology companies, but really. So there's a classification debate. But yeah, I was less familiar with like how the definition of the work week and where that would come into play. Like what are the policy specifics? And you were just talking about a sectoral analysis. Is that part of the idea and the research, the policy agenda or what's your gold standard of how we would redefine the work week and then yeah, what would it mean? Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about these policies, I don't know if this is, there we go. What's interesting about the policies is actually we're stating cities and states actually having to define what the work week is, which is like, you wouldn't, like it's amazing. Actually, it's like pretty groundbreaking, right? And the, I mean, you don't, you can't define a work week for an app worker who actually isn't actually a worker. They're a entrepreneur, independent contractor. So I think that's really challenging. And when you look at like the Uber level and we think about voices and platforms for people to have some say in their job, there's a debate right now in Seattle because workers won the right to unionize and there's a debate of who gets to vote, right? So Uber's workforce is massively, people work very few hours a week and you know, but should they, someone who just drives five hours a week have the same boat as someone who's supporting their whole family on the job? So there is just like, and it's a, I, you know, I mean, it's like a conundrum, right? Like I just think a lot of people are doing a lot of different kinds of work and how we value what say you have and what the industry standard is like is a complex issue. And you know, I think what we found is that like, you know, getting away from generalized classifications where someone's like full-time or part-time is really, we don't really actually pay any attention to those classifications because what we found in the service economy is that actually you'll see people classified as part-time, but working full-time hours, but then being denied benefits because they're classified as part-time. So it just, if they're not helpful, you have to track like average hours when you think about it. And you know, there's a problem overall, we do a lot of public education, like we have way too many policies in this country where that should be universal benefits like healthcare or family leave that are even some earn sick time laws that are kind of going to affect if you work a certain number of hours as opposed to like a universal benefit. Another question? I'm about to hear on the side. Hi, I'm Susan Laban and I've been interested in this topic for a long time. And in the last few years, I've been working on the US Department of Labor's demonstration and evaluation of what they call short-time compensation or most of the world calls it work sharing. And so in everyday parlance, if a company has lower demand, can they reduce the hours like furlough and say instead of laying people off 20% of your workforce, you could reduce everybody 20% of their hours, give them a day off and they would still get a prorated unemployment benefit. So we just finished the study, it's on the DOL website and I encourage you to look at it to see, you know, and so my particular interest is broadening that concept outside of the UI system and talking about how the concept of work sharing and redefining what a productive work week is. And so there's different ways one can approach that at first, right? There's the campaigns and public information and culture, which is important. And then there's federal policy or demonstrations and there's also just working perhaps in the private realm of targeting companies to see if they would wanna participate in a demonstration. So I guess one of my questions, particularly for Carrie but for anybody on the panel or the audiences, well it's hard to generalize by industry or sector or maybe or perhaps tier of industries. I'd love to hear people's ideas of where do they think would be a good place to target in order to get some critical mass and to demonstrate the kind of change that we wanna see. I have not looked as much in work sharing because it is not as much a useful strategy for people in the service economy. And so I, but I do know of a lot of good examples where there are industries like in factories where there's layoffs where it can be helpful. I think that there's a challenge around accountability and this move to part-time work. How does work sharing not become like a permanent reduction in the work week is a concern. But I have seen it, I do believe it can be like a successful strategy. It was Oregon and it was very interesting. I interviewed the employers around the state that were not a law of them but some. And it's interesting the variation. I mean, when you look at the numbers and typically you think of it in terms of manufacturing and that's what comes to mind. But if you look at Oregon, you see that there's professionals of all kinds really are benefiting and using the program and there's a lot of creativity in the use. So just to mention that. I think we have time for about one more question. Well, why don't we try to do these last two, the these two. Yeah, you had your hands up for a long time. Thank you. Hi, my name is Chuck Wilsker. I'm the president of a nonprofit called the Telework Coalition. And two comments. One was having to do with who is the hindrance in adopting a flexible work program. In 2005, the federal government came up with the Telework Enhancement Act and what the Telework Enhancement Act did is it left it to mid-level managers to determine whether or not their employees were eligible to do this. Didn't work because it was more work for them. It was more work for anybody. So nobody was eligible. We actually made recommendation to the state of Virginia for the Telework Virginia program that we then talked to the federal government that incorporated into it. And it was just the same thing, but base-acquards. It was going out and saying that, assume that everybody is eligible unless the mid-level manager comes in and gives a good reason why they can't. So all of a sudden, the flexibility was basically the same thing, but in one blanket, you can't do it. In the other is, this is why you can't or, geez, I don't have a really good reason to do it. So it's just something, because it came before, how do you do this? And I think it's just the way you position it. Okay, one other point that I wanted to make was the, how do you know they're working? My favorite question, because, again, you made the point, well, you see them at their desk. Facebook, Twitter. Looking for another job, personal emails, all these kind of things. What you really need to do for flexible work is you need to have a metrics developed. So you know how much is a good worker doing when they're in the office? Simple. I mean, you have enough people, enough input coming in. How do I know what they're doing? Now, when somebody goes home, if they're doing the same thing, that works out pretty well. If they're doing 10% more, 20% more, average we've seen is 22%. This is really good. Don't, let it go. If somebody's doing 10% less, now you need to do it. But how do I know they're working? You don't know they're working. Somebody's working just because they're sitting at their desk. I mean, how many hours, I did study once and I figured that in an eight hour day if somebody actually worked five hours, their employer was getting a lot of good work out of them. So if you know what they should be doing, then it's a lot easier to measure it. I have more of what I'll leave it for somebody else. Okay, last question. President of School Biz Match. Labor management relations, that whole component, I don't know what percentage now of the workforce is labor or unionized, is this part of their request? In other words, my thinking is where is the, it's been asked several times, where is the demand really for this in order to make it policy? Let's take that one. Does labor, do those agreements entail flexibility? Labor management? It's all up, it depends. But yeah, it depends. Some do, some don't. On the point, I think you're absolutely right because this, being in the office does not mean you're productive, that you're doing work, but you're assumed that it is. And one of the kind of product goods ways in which like flexible working is increasing productivity or work intensity is that when you work teleworking or flexible time, then you get the productive hours. Employers will get the good productive hours of the whole day. And it's all very different because of the different bio rhythms of everybody that it will be very different, as well as the demands. And this is why a lot of the studies kind of on this field talks about results only based evaluations where if you really evaluate just what comes out of the workers in terms of productivity, you see that actually flexibility makes sense. And it's just that I think there's a step like, because it isn't prevalent and it isn't widely accepted yet that people are just so hesitant to actually make that step change because you can't, you know, you feel like you can't manage a worker in different kind of at home or in different areas. So, and I think it's just a way, a lot of things I kind of feel like it's a mental like a step change that needs to happen. And again, the trust in the workers. I wonder how much of that can be. Yeah. You know, I think one of the problems is the assumption that when people are in the office they're working so what ends up happening is when somebody is telecommuting, they're put under a microscope. Suddenly you're watching their response time. You're watching, right? Like how long is it taking them to respond to my email? Well, if that person was sitting in the office you were not measuring their response time. So we also have to be careful about how we're evaluating whether people are actually working or not working when they're telecommuting. So I would say, you know, it just probably, you discover performance issues maybe a lot faster when somebody's telecommuting because your perception is, oh, John's in the office. He's working really hard. I see him till eight o'clock at night. Whether he's producing or not. But you know, John is home and I don't know because you're looking at that response time and you're looking at certain things. Yeah. But it's hard. Right, which is what I'm saying, but I'm also thinking that you also have to make sure that what you're measuring is fair across the board when you're looking at it. All right, so lots of really great action agendas. The main one coming with, as Jennifer says, getting rid of some very old and calcified mindsets. So let's all go change our minds. All right, thanks everybody for coming. Thank you.