Corporate Voices for Working Families is partnering with Working Mother Media to recognize the best companies for hourly workers and to highlight best practices throughout the American business community.
The recognition is modeled after Working Mother’s highly regarded and influential 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers listing.
The application for Best Companies for Hourly Employees Workers — and additional information — is now available online.
Here’s a WorldatWork blog post that looks at the Best Companies for Hourly Workers recognition as well as recent Corporate Voices research involving hourly workers.
Those companies included on the Best Companies for Hourly Workers list will be featured in the May 2010 issue of Working Mother magazine and honored at a celebration in New York City.
A new study by WorldatWork and the Work Design Collaborative (WDC) indicates that the number of hourly workers in the U.S. using flexible scheduling benefits such as teleworking is larger than expected. The study, “Flexible Work Arrangements for Nonexempt Employees,” found that a surprisingly high number of companies are allowing nonexempt employees to telework despite traditional limitations such as work hour and safety requirements.
Among the key findings:
- Nonexempt employees participate in flexible work programs to a much larger extent than researchers had anticipated. 45% of survey respondents (61 out of 135 organizations) report they include nonexempt employees in those programs.
- The three biggest industrial sectors allowing nonexempts to telework were manufacturing, education and business services. Manufacturing came as a surprise as it is traditionally dominated by nonexempt employees working on site.
Corporate Voices for Working Families released Innovative Workplace Flexibility Options for Hourly Workers in May, which also concluded that workplace flexibility works as well for hourly workers as it does for professional workers. To view this and other reports on workplace flexibility, please visit the Corporate Voices website.
By Allison Tomei
Donna Klein, Executive Chair of Corporate Voices was quoted in a recent Parade magazine article about the affordability of quality child care.
The article states that two-thirds of all American women are working by the time their first child is a year old, compared with only 17% four decades ago. The cost of child care—which has risen by as much as 11% in the last two years—varies widely, depending on such factors as location, type of care, and the age of the child. Nationwide, the cost ranges from $3380 to $10,787 for one preschooler, according to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies. Full-time care for one infant at a center can be as much as $15,895 a year. A full-time babysitter may cost from $400 to $1,000 a week, depending on where you live.
Corporate Voices has been taking a leading role in advocating for an increase in the cap of dependent care spending accounts. The current DCFSA cap was a figure that was established in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. More than 20 years have passed and in today’s dollars, this tax benefit is worth only $2,800, even as the cost of child care has dramatically increased.
According to federal law, any employer can establish a DCAP (Dependent Care Account Program), allowing employees to set aside up to $5,000 of pre-tax income (or a lower ceiling, if the employer chooses) to help cover the cost of child care, elder care, or care of a disabled spouse or disabled dependent. Employees do not have to pay federal income taxes or Social Security and Medicare taxes on the funds they’ve set aside. They can save—depending on their incomes—between $1,100 – $2,600 a year on their child care or dependent care expenses.
By Allison Tomei
