Meet the “Best of Congress”

Corporate Voices for Working Families and Working Mother Media
Honor Congressional Members Making a Difference for Working Families

Honoring leaders on Capitol Hill for improving the American quality of life through family-friendly work policies, Corporate Voices for Working Families and Working Mother Media announced today the 24 recipients of the inaugural Best of Congress award. The award spotlights congressional excellence in supporting working families through legislation and by practicing what they preach – employing family-friendly policies in their own offices. Equally important, the award honors individual members of Congress from both sides of the aisle and throughout the country for their leadership in improving the quality of life for working families.

Recipients of the Best of Congress award are featured in the August/September 2008 issue of Working Mother magazine.

“Not only did we judge the esteemed members on their voting records for supporting working families, we also examined the benefits that their own employees receive like paid leave and flextime,” Carol Evans, CEO, Working Mother Media, said. “There are no rules about flextime or paid leave for Congressional staff. They are stepping up voluntarily because they believe in progressive policies and act on their beliefs in the real world managing their staff.”

“The recipients of the Best of Congress award serve as models for what can be accomplished through legislation and a personal commitment to policies that benefit working families,” Donna Klein, president and founder of Corporate Voices for Working Families, said. “As our nation wrestles with a host of economic and other issues involving working families, these members of Congress deserve to be congratulated and recognized nationally for their leadership and support.”

Recipients of the Best of Congress award are:

U.S. Senate
•    Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-Delaware)
•    Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)
•    Robert P. Casey, Jr. (D-Pennsylvania)
•    Christopher J. Dodd (D-Connecticut)
•    Elizabeth Dole (R-North Carolina)
•    Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas)
•    Johnny Isakson (R-Georgia)
•    Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota)
•    Herb Kohl (D-Wisconsin)
•    Gordon H. Smith (R-Oregon)

U.S. House of Representatives
•    Tom Allen (D-Maine)
•    Russ Carnahan (D-Missouri)
•    Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Connecticut)
•    Chaka Fattah (D-Pennsylvania)
•    Carolyn B. Maloney (D-New York)
•    Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio)
•    Dave Reichert (R-Washington)
•    C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D-Maryland)
•    Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida)
•    Allyson Y. Schwartz (D-Pennsylvania)
•    Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut)
•    Ellen O. Tauscher (D-California)
•    Lynn Woolsey (D-California)
•    John Yarmuth (D-Kentucky)

Fifty members of Congress submitted applications for this inaugural award. Applicants were judged on their voting record, sponsored/co-sponsored legislation, and efforts to promote legislation that supports working families.  In addition, applicants were asked to submit policies and practices within their own offices that support working families and flexible workplace options.

Applications were reviewed by a bipartisan steering committee co-chaired by Ted Childs, Founder and Principal of Ted Childs, LLC and Jane Swift, Founder and Principal of WNP Consulting, LLC and former Governor of Massachusetts.  Also on the steering committee reviewing applications were Patricia Kempthorne, Founder and Executive Director of the Twiga Foundation and Pat Schroeder, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers and former congresswoman from Colorado.

The Best of Congress award will be presented to members of Congress at a recognition breakfast in Washington on Sept. 10, at Sewell House.  Recipients of the Best of Congress award will attend, and Antonio M. Perez, CEO of Kodak, will talk about the award and issues involving working families.

by Rob Jewell

Work/life programs, not just for mommies

The Worcester Business Journal, has recently profiled Corporate Voices and one of our partner companies, Abbott Bioresearch Center, in an article about flexible work schedules.

“Not Just for Mommies” looks at solutions to the concept of managing work and family and, contrary to popular belief, it is not only women who reap the benefits. The article emphasizes how advantageous it is for companies to have flexible work schedules because it “boosts productivity” and leads to better employee retention.

Another party who profits equally from the work/life programs are the dads. According to the article, 90% of Abbott’s 340 employees have incorporated the flexible working options into their lives. This overwhelming participation in the alternative working schedules illustrates the need for such polices.

However, citing a study by Corporate Voices, the article also notes that it is much more common for higher wage jobs to have flexible schedules.

According to a 2006 study by the policy group Corporate Voices For Working Families, 40 percent of workers making $100,000 a year or more have flexible schedules, compared to 22 percent of those making $25,000 to $50,000 and 10 percent of those who make less than that.

It makes sense that companies who spend a good deal of time and money training their workers would be vested in having their workers stay at the company, essentially getting the return on their investment. However, as our study shows, that still leaves low wage workers with less time to spend with their children. I don’t think many people would disagree that, whether you make $100,000 or $20,000, if you have children they are your number one priority. Therefore, why should higher paid workers be able to spend time with their children, when lower wage workers cannot?

This article, while beautifully highlighting the positive steps that some companies, like Abbott, are taking, made me wonder a few things.

For instance, how should a lower wage worker, or even a higher wage worker that does not have the option of a flexible work schedule, interpret these findings? If having flexible work/life policies indicates that the companies value their workers, are workers who do not have flexible policies not valued?

And, as the article points out, when workers feel valued they perform better. So, if workers will perform at a higher level, and there is a high demand for family-friendly policies, why is every company not on board with this concept, following in Abbott’s footsteps?

By Allison Keyser

Bob Herbert: Our nation’s at-risk youth

There are a group of hopeless and uneducated young adults in our nation who are struggling to find even minimum wage jobs.

Working ‘just to get by’ isn’t as possible as it used to be. In fact, for 4 million young adults, a job at all is extremely questionable.

After reading an Op-Ed article — “Out of Sight” — by Bob Herbert in the The New York Times last Tuesday about our nation’s at-risk youth, I found some breathtaking statistics about the lack of job opportunities.

According to Herbert, a disastrous unemployment number was released last Friday, claiming, “The official jobless rate had jumped one-half a percentage point in May to 5.5 percent – the sharpest spike in 22 years.”

The problem is that there is a vast group of young-adults and teenagers, between the ages of 16 to 24 years old, who are not in school and face tough odds in the job market.

According to Herbert, these “youngsters” are trying, but they are losing hope. After searching and searching for a job it is easy to get discouraged.

The summer job market, which has long been an important first step in preparing teenagers for the world of work, is shaping up this year as the weakest in more than half a century, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.

My first question is what can we do to open up job opportunities?

And next, are there no second chances for the underprivileged? A basic education is a first step in the right direction, which should be easy for each and every person in our democratic nation.

Everyone has something to offer in this country and it is a shame to see such bright young individuals not given a chance. Job opportunity is just the very first step to making an individual make a difference in this world.

And David Jones, president of the Community Services Society of New York, a Corporate Voices strategic partner, provides some key insight in the context of Herbert’s column.

“These kids are being challenged in ways that my generation was not,” said David Jones, the president of the Community Service Society of New York, which tries to develop ways to connect these young men and women with employment opportunities, or get them back into school.

It is extremely difficult because, for the most part, the jobs are not there and the educational establishment is having a hard enough time teaching the kids who are still in school.

“Schools have not made much of an effort to bring this population back in,” said Mr. Jones. “Once you fall out of the system, you’re basically on no one’s programmatic radar screen.”

By: Amy Simon

Amy is a journalism major at Penn State who is interning this summer with Corporate Voices for Working Families.

Meet our new bloggers

This summer Corporate Voices will have two summer interns who during their time with us will contribute to our blog.

Meet Amy Simon and Allison Keyser:

Amy Simon

Amy is a Senior majoring in Journalism with minors in International Studies and Spanish at Penn State University. She is an identical twin and a competitive cheerleader at Penn State. After undergrad Amy plans to attend law school.

Allison Keyser

Allison is a Senior majoring in Psychology and Women’s Studies at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. While not in class Allison is the Vice President of her sorority PI Beta Phi, works as a tour guide and tutors in the Writing Center at Dickinson.

By Susan Holbrook

Karen Pittman: “Bringing precision to our passion”

Karen Pittman, a member of the Corporate Voices Advisory Board and president of the Forum for Youth Investment, has an extremely interesting and provocative column in the May 2008 Youth Today. Here’s the opening paragraph from the column, titled “Precision Engineering.”

Creating sound bites that are not only memorable but communicate a message is a passion of mine. Every now and then I hit one out of the park. “Problem-free isn’t fully prepared” is still in use after more than 15 years. I think “bringing precision to our passion” may be the next one to stick.

Karen says that passion and precision are sometimes seen as opposites. “The call for passion and precision is a call for us to blend them. Think head/heart. Capacity/motivation. Our actions improve when they are informed by both.”

Then she talks about how this helps to change the odds for young people.

Changing the odds for young people requires us to not only be passionate in our commitment to providing high-quality supports and opportunities to all youth, but precise in measuring how well we and they are doing, so that we can make real-time system adjustments. It’s not enough to care. We have to calculate, compare and count.

But, she says, developing metrics for our programs is not enough.

It is also not enough to simply develop metrics for our own programs. Young people don’t grow up in programs; they grow up in communities. We must develop community-level dashboards whose clear measurements compel community leaders to think differently, so that together they can act differently.

Karen then provides several examples and best-practice success stories. If you would like a copy of the entire column, leave us a comment on this blog (go to the link at the end of the post that says no comments/or comment) with your e-mail address. I’ll be delighted to e-mail you a copy of this informative column by Karen Pittman.

by Rob Jewell

Corporate Voices: Annual Meeting, Sept. 8-9

Save the date for our 7th annual partnership meeting, Sept. 8-9, at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington — Mapping New Avenues for 21st Century Working Families.

Our annual meeting brings together policymakers and the private sector to navigate issues facing working families. Highlights will include keynote addresses by Tony Wagner of Harvard and Beth Brooke of Ernst & Young.

The meeting will begin at noon on Sept. 8 and conclude with the Best of Congress Awards Breakfast Sept. 10.

For more information and sponsorship opportunities, please contact Susan Holbrook at sholbrook@cvworkingfamilies.org or 212-333-8922.

by Rob Jewell

The Coming Job Surplus

I’ll admit it. It’s hard for me to grasp that we are heading for time in this country when there are more jobs than available workers. But from a number of projections and estimates — many included in our Corporate Voices research and studies — it’s a fact. And something that we need to start dealing with. It has important implications for education, business, young and mature workers and our country as a whole.

Yet I live in Ohio. We’ve lost thousands of high-paying management and manufacturing jobs in the last decade. And typical is the situation facing thousands of graduates of our colleges and universities here who have education degrees. Highly trained and highly qualified. But few teaching jobs in Ohio. So they are enthusiastically recruited by school systems out of state. At the same time, Ohio, particularly in the Northeast industrial part of the state, is attracting new jobs that require skilled workers. And as I understand it, some of these jobs even now go unfilled.

The contrast with other states, however, is jarring. Take Iowa as an example. A story printed May 31 in The New York Times — “As Job Surplus Grows in Iowa, Workers Are Calling the Shots” — provides an interesting case study of what we are likely to face throughout the country in the not-to-distant future. Here’s from the article:

As rising unemployment and layoffs beset workers around the country, Iowa faces a different problem: a surplus of jobs. Or to put it another way: a shortage of workers. A survey of companies by Iowa Workforce Development, a state agency, found as many as 48,000 job vacancies, in industries including financial services — Des Moines trails only Hartford as the nation’s insurance capital — health care and skilled manufacturing. One estimate projects the job surplus to reach 198,000 by 2014, with vacancies increasingly in professional positions. Greater Des Moines alone faces a shortfall of 60,000 workers in the next decade.

The state provides a small, advance view of what some economists predict will be a broader shortage of skilled workers in the next 20 or 30 years, as tens of millions of baby boomers retire from the workplace, and the economy produces more new jobs than workers. Potential consequences include slower economic growth and competitiveness, as well as higher wages for skilled workers and greater inequality.

Estimates of the national shortage run as high as 14 million skilled workers by 2020, according to widely cited projections by the labor economists Anthony P. Carnevale and Donna M. Desrochers.

Elyse Rosenblum, who manages workforce readiness projects for Corporate Voices, is putting the final touches on a white paper and other material that examines this important issue. We’ll distribute that information soon.

And the next time I talk to Elyse I’ll ask her what’s going to happen in Ohio. That will be interesting.

by Rob Jewell

Making the grade: high school dropouts

I spent several years teaching media writing at Kent State University. And during that time I developed an even greater appreciation for writers who can make their points concisely and forcefully. Bob Herbert, who writes a column for The New York Times, is one of the best.

Here’s an example — and it involves the issue of workforce readiness and high school dropouts. In his column May 17 — “Hard Roads Ahead” — Herbert writes:

At a time when the nation is faced with tough economic challenges at home and ever-increasing competition from abroad, it’s incredible that more is not being done about the poor performance of so many American high schools.

We can’t even keep the kids in school. A third of them drop out. Half of those who remain go on to graduate without the skills for college or a decent job. Someone please tell me how this is a good thing.

Well, Bob Wise certainly isn’t going to tell Herbert or anyone else that. Wise, the former governor of West Virginia, is now president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, described by Herbert as a “policy and advocacy group committed to improving the high schools.” He’s also written a book on the subject: “Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation.”

And in addition to mentioning some key points from Wise’s book, Herbert also highlights the recent announcement that the AT&T Foundation was sponsoring “a $100 million initiative to address the high school dropout problem and improve the readiness of American teenagers for college and the real world of work.”

This issue of workforce readiness is a key priority for Corporate Voices for Working Families and our member companies and strategic partners. And Elyse Rosenblum, an expert on this subject with Corporate Voices, is putting the final touches on our statement of principles on workforce readiness as well as a comprehensive white paper on the subject. Copies will be available soon.

In the meantime, here’s the conclusion to Herbert’s column:

An issue that is front and center in the campaign is the economy. We’re looking for ways to turn things around for the short and long term. One of the answers in this technologically advanced, highly competitive, increasingly globalized environment is staring us right in the eyes.

As Mr. Wise put it, “The best economic stimulus package is a diploma.”

In total Bob Herbert wrote 765 words. But he sure said a lot: concisely and forcefully.

By Rob Jewell

Families and Work Institute: National Study of Employers

The Families and Work Institute released yesterday the results of the 2008 National Study of Employers. A key finding: employers with more women and more minorities in top positions, and nonprofit organizations, are more likely to offer flexible workplaces.

“There has been surprising stability in many of the practices, policies and programs of U.S. employers over the past 10 years,” said Ellen Galinsky, president and founder of Families and Work Institute and lead author of the study. “The NSE confirms that in the face of economic volatility companies have generally held steady or reduced benefits that carry hard costs. Yet in certain areas — including domestic partner benefits and access to information on support services — we are seeing an expansion of benefits. We find it particularly interesting that having an employee base composed of a greater percentage of women, or the presence of women and minorities in senior positions, is correlated with a more flexible workplace.”

First conducted in 1998, the 2008 National Study of Employers is described as “the most comprehensive and far-reaching study of initiatives provided by U.S. employers to address the changing needs of today’s workforce.”

An article in this morning’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Study: Fewer monetary benefits, more flexibility at work,” says:

While employers are slashing benefits to save money, they are using other tactics to try to retain workers, according to a study that will be released today in Philadelphia.

In its “2008 National Study of Employers” the Families and Work Institute found that employees are more likely to stay with on the job if employers provide flexibility in the workplace.

The study also found that while employers are dealing with the faltering economy by cutting benefits, such as health care and pensions, that directly take away from the bottom line, programs that cost money but improve the quality of life at the workplace, such as on-site child care, are not being reduced.

The study will be presented today at the World at Work Conference in Philadelphia.

by Rob Jewell

Embracing workplace flexibility

Maggie Jackson, writing in the Boston Globe this morning, looks at flexibility in the workplace in an article, “More employers embrace flexible scheduling.”

The article profiles several recipients of the Sloan Awards for Business Excellence in Workplace Flexibility, held by the Families and Work Institute and the Alfred E. Sloan Foundation.

Jackson writes:

“…the business case for flexibility is sound. Employees who have a measure of flexibility at work have significantly greater job satisfaction, commitment to work, and engagement with a company, along with lower stress, according to research compiled by the nonprofit Corporate Voices for Working Families. Increasingly, executives are dropping their past reluctance to part with the 9 to 5, in-office model of work.”

A copy of the research results is available on the Corporate Voices for Working Families Web site.

The Boston Globe article quotes Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute.

“We know from the research that if you have choice or autonomy and you have the support to make those choices and you’re held accountable, those are the things that most affect how you feel about your employer, as well as your health and well-being.”

Jackson concludes:

“Is flexibility a part of the fabric of work life in America? Not yet. There are still many organizations where different ways of working are forbidden, or handed out sparingly, along with lower pay or fewer promotions. The Sloan Award pioneers, however, are shifting that mindset, one flex-option at a time.”

by Rob Jewell