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S. HRG. 108–535

PARENTS RAISING CHILDREN: THE WORKPLACE

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION,

LABOR, AND PENSIONS

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

ON

EXAMINING WORKING PARENTS AND THEIR CHILDREN, FOCUSING ON

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION, ELDER CARE PROGRAMS, THE

EARNED INCOME TAX CREDIT (EITC), AND WORKPLACE FLEXIBILITY

APRIL 22, 2004

Printed for the use of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions

(
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS

JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire, Chairman

BILL FRIST, Tennessee

MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming

LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee

CHRISTOPHER S. BOND, Missouri

MIKE DEWINE, Ohio

PAT ROBERTS, Kansas

JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama

JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada

LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina

JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia

EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut

TOM HARKIN, Iowa

BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland

JAMES M. JEFFORDS (I), Vermont

JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico

PATTY MURRAY, Washington

JACK REED, Rhode Island

JOHN EDWARDS, North Carolina

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York

SHARON R. SODERSTROM, Staff Director

J. MICHAEL MYERS, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee, Chairman

MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming

CHRISTOPHER S. BOND, Missouri

MIKE DEWINE, Ohio

PAT ROBERTS, Kansas

JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama

JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada

LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina

JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut

TOM HARKIN, Iowa

JAMES M. JEFFORDS (I), Vermont

JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico

PATTY MURRAY, Washington

JACK REED, Rhode Island

JOHN EDWARDS, North Carolina

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York

MARGUERITE SALLEE, Staff Director

GRACE A. REEF, Minority Staff Director

(II)
CONTENTS

STATEMENTS

THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 2004

Page

Alexander, Hon. Lamar, a U.S. Senator from the State of Tennessee, opening

statement .............................................................................................................. 1

Galinsky, Ellen, President, Families and Work Institute; and Karen

Kornbluh, Director, Work & Family Programs, New America Foundation .... 3

Prepared Statements of:

Ellen Galinsky ........................................................................................... 8

Karen Kornbluh ......................................................................................... 13

Klein, Donna M., President and CEO Corporate Voices for Working Families;

Zoila and Manuel Martinez, Employees of Marriott Corporation; Joy

Bunson, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, JPMorgan Chase; Michael Shum, Director of Global Workforce Diversity Operations, IBM; and

Carol Evans, CEO of Working Mother Media, and Editor, Working Mother

Magazine ............................................................................................................... 23

Prepared Statements of:

Donna Klein ............................................................................................... 25

Zoila and Manuel Martinez ...................................................................... 29

Dodd, Hon. Christopher J., a U.S. Senator from the State of Connecticut,

prepared statement .............................................................................................. 30

Prepared Statements of:

Joy Bunson ................................................................................................. 34

Mike Shum ................................................................................................. 38

Carol Evans ............................................................................................... 45

(III)

(1)

PARENTS RAISING CHILDREN: THE

WORKPLACE

THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 2004

U.S. SENATE,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND FAMILIES, COMMITTEE ON

HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS,

Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:04 a.m., in room

SD–430, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Lamar Alexander

[chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.

Present: Senators Alexander and Clinton.

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ALEXANDER

Senator ALEXANDER. Good morning. This is another in a series

of subcommittee hearings on the job of being a parent in America

today.

During the year 2003, we held five hearings at Fort Campbell,

at Fort Stewart, Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, the Groton

Submarine Base in Connecticut, and here in Washington, DC. All

those focused on military parents raising children. Among other

subjects, we investigated child care and housing, pay, reciprocity

among States on educational standards, as ways of providing support for today’s fighting men and women. More than half of whom

are married, and more than half of whom have children.

The job of being a parent is harder today in the United States

of America. Families are broken and parents are busier than ever

before. Children, as a result, are hurting, and so is our country,

therefore.

Perhaps our greatest single problem as a country is not terrorism, not jobs growth, but the absence of parents in the lives of their

own children. Committed loving parents who set a good example

are the greatest gifts that we can give to a child, but too often we

have devalued the job of being a parent. Trash on television, the

risk of drug and sexual abuse, higher taxes, the separation of marriage from parenting, unsafe streets, schools that don’t educate, all

of these make it harder for parents, especially low-income parents.

Our purpose in this series of hearings is to focus on ways that

we can put the Federal Government back on the side of parents

raising children. We recently have taken some steps in the right

direction: increasing the child care tax credit, making it possible for

parents to have more time at home with their children, and increasing support for after-school programs to make it more likely
2

that children have supervision while parents are still working or

are away. But we can do better than that.

Today, which happens to be ‘‘Take our daughters and sons to

work’’ day, we are going to be talking about making the workplace

more family-friendly. There has been no greater social change in

American society during the last 35 years than the increase in the

number of mothers working away from home. In 1960, 70 percent

of families had one parent at home full time. Today, it’s just the

opposite. Fully 70 percent of families with children are now headed

by two parents or a single parent who have a job away from home.

The workplace has been slow to respond to this new reality. The

Federal Government has also been slow to respond. It wasn’t always this way. During World War II, women went to work in the

factories. We remember hearing about signs of ‘‘Rosie the Riveter’’,

while the men went off to war. The workplace then bent over backwards to accommodate family needs with child care, grocery services at the work site, as well as flexible work schedules.

Then the men came home from the war and the women went

back home, too, by and large, and that was the end of employer interest in a family-friendly workplace for a while. Gradually, this

has been changing again, but not as rapidly as it needs to change.

We can’t go back to the days of ‘‘Ozzie and Harriet’’, and I am not

suggesting that, but we can have a government that is on the side

of parents raising children, and we can encourage employers to

adapt and support the reality of working parents and perhaps

make it easier for them to do so. Together, we need to look for ways

to support parents, not undermine them, in this very difficult and

important work of raising their children in our world today.

During this hearing, we will look at the challenges working parents face today, how employees are responding to the family issues

of their employees, and what the Federal Government might do to

help both employers and employees, whether that is through legislation, policy, regulations, or even just getting out of the way. We

will address some of the key issues that American businesses are

focusing on to improve their employee situations, such as flexible

work schedules, early childhood education, the increasing need for

elder care and the unique needs of low wage earning families.

We are fortunate today to have some important new research on

the condition of parents who have jobs away from home. Our first

panel will discuss parents at work, their needs. On that first panel

will be Ellen Galinsky, the President of Families and Work Institute, who will discuss the Institute’s new research on what makes

an effective workplace and the status of flexibility in the workforce.

Next, Karen Kornbluh will testify. Karen is the Director of Work

& Family Programs for the New America Foundation. She will

highlight the dramatically changing profile of American families

and why flexibility in the workplace is an important issue.

Our second panel will discuss parents at work, the employers’ response. First we will hear from Donna Klein, President and CEO

of Corporate Voices, a coalition of 45 of America’s largest employers. She will be followed by Zoila and Manuel Martinez, employees

of the Marriott Corporation. They will give us an important perspective on workplace issues from the point of view of a wage earning family.
3

After the Martinezes, we will hear from representatives of two of

America’s largest and most respected companies, especially when it

comes to responding to the needs of working parents. Joy Bunson,

Senior Vice President of JPMorgan Chase, and Mike Shum, Senior

Vice President of the IBM Corporation.

Our final witness will be Carol Evans, Chief Executive Officer of

Working Mother Media and publisher of Working Mother magazine, which is perhaps best known for its annual list of the top 100

companies for working mothers. The list is now 18 years old and

has served as a powerful incentive to encourage employers to become more family-friendly.

Since I have now pretty well introduced all the witnesses, we will

begin with Carol Galinsky and Karen Kornbluh. As I mentioned,

Ms. Galinsky will talk more about the new research that she has

just announced. She has been doing that for a number of years,

helping us understand the facts about the workplace and how it affects working families. She is a leading authority and is regularly

seen on morning television shows across America.

After her, Karen Kornbluh of the New American Foundation,

which is a nonpartisan policy institute here in Washington, will

speak. She began her career as an economist at Alan Greenspan’s

economic forecasting firm, which may mean we won’t understand

a word that she says today if she learned from Dr. Greenspan.

[Laughter.]

She also was at the Treasury Department working with Secretary Rubin. She will comment on this information and on the

background and changes in American society as it affects parents,

families, and the workforce. So we welcome Ms. Galinsky and we

welcome Ms. Kornbluh.

Ms. Galinsky, we will start with you. If you could summarize

your remarks in maybe 10 minutes, each of you, then we would

have time for questions, and then we will go on to the second

panel.

Welcome.

STATEMENTS OF ELLEN GALINSKY, PRESIDENT, FAMILIES

AND WORK INSTITUTE; AND KAREN KORNBLUH, DIRECTOR,

WORK & FAMILY PROGRAMS, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION

Ms. GALINSKY. Thank you so much, Senator Alexander. It is wonderful to be here, and it is wonderful to be able to comment on

these issues with my colleagues from the New America Foundation,

and then from Corporate Voices and from leading corporations and

with families.

As we know, the workplace today is not our father’s workplace.

No longer are whistles that signal the start and the end of the

workday commonplace. No longer are photos of our family members

at work the sole reminders that we have a life outside of work, and

no longer is loyalty to employers an automatic promise of a job for

life.

A sea change has occurred over the past decades that has affected our families, our society, our economy, our competitiveness,

and our global presence. Technology, as we all know, because we

had to turn off our cell phones to come in here, has blurred the

lines between work and home. The economy is global and is 24/7.
4

New phrases have entered our vocabularies, such as the time

squeeze or the time famine, and I have to say I am tempted to say

it goes from ‘‘feeling overworked’’ to ‘‘you’re fired’’ these days.

Families and Work Institute conducts the largest and most comprehensive study of the U.S. workforce addressing issues of life on

and off the job. Our national study of the changing workforce surveys representative samples of the Nation’s workforce every 5

years. We have these data available from 1992, 1997, and 2002,

and we are building on a study that the Department of Labor used

to do and stopped doing in 1977, but we have similar questions so

that we can compare what has happened in the past generation

over the past 25 years.

Our most recent report, as Senator Alexander mentioned, with

findings on flexibility is the focus of my testimony today, and will

also be the focus of upcoming business forums in eight communities

in partnership with the Center for Workforce Preparation, which is

an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and with the Center

for Emerging Futures, through funding from the Sloan Foundation.

There are a lot of key findings in this report, ‘‘When Work

Works’’, which was funded by IBM, so I am not going to tell them

all to you. We do have them available on our website. But I would

like to set the stage by sharing some data that I think are most

relevant to our discussion. They reflect the world according to U.S.

employees.

The time famine is real. The majority of U.S. employees, 67 percent, say that they don’t have enough time with their children.

That stayed the same over the past 5 years. But the majority of

employees, 63 percent, say they don’t have enough time with their

spouses, and that has shot way up by about 13 points over the last

5 years. The majority of employees, 55 percent, say that they don’t

have enough time for themselves.

I would like to remind you, though, before I go on, that this is

a nationally representative study of the U.S. workforce. It represents workers from all levels of jobs, from all parts of the country. They work in gas stations, to corner offices, and they do reflect

the genuine diversity of our country.

Although we talk about the 40-hour workweek, it is not a reality.

Men work on average 49 hours per week, and women work 43.5

hours per week, and that figure includes the one-in-four women

who work part time. So if you just took full-time workers, it would

be way higher. Fourteen percent of employees have a second job,

and 61 percent of employees, men and women alike, want to work

fewer hours than they do—by about nine hours on average. They

want to go back to more like the 40-hour workweek.

Seventy-eight percent of families in 2002 are comprised of dualincome earners, as Senator Alexander mentioned. In fact, only one

out of every 33 fathers is now bringing home the bacon, compared

to one-in-two 25 years ago. For dual earner couples with children,

combined work hours have shot up by 10 hours, from 81 hours per

week in 1977 to 91 hours per week, and the Senator talked about

families, not really having time with their families.

Forty-five percent of the U.S. workforce feels conflict between

their work and family life. They feel pulled, they feel stretched

thin. In my book, ‘‘Ask the Children’’, which was a nationally rep-
5

resentative study of kids from eight to 18 years old, we asked kids

what their number one wish would be for improving their lives

with their families. To the surprise of many people, kids said that

they wished their parents would be less stressed and less tired. We

found in another study that one out of three young people feel very

stressed themselves, so it is not just stress of parents. It is the

stress of kids as well.

Now, in listening to this data, one might think why don’t these

employees just change things? Why don’t they adjust their lives?

After all, this is America, and choice is a very strong value in our

lives.

But here is where the disconnect becomes evident. Employees do

not feel that they have a choice or can make these changes on their

own. That is very clear. When you do focus groups with employees,

when you read what they write, in chat rooms, it is a very strong

message, that the choices we supposedly have are choices either

that aren’t real to them—they feel there would be jeopardy—or

they can’t make them.

Thirty-seven percent of part-time employees would prefer to be

working full time. But if you look at older workers, workers who

are 60 and older, 57 percent very strongly want part-time work.

Health insurance, as we all know, is of huge concern to many in

our country and is a major consideration in employment and job

choice. But only 40 percent of employees in part-time positions are

offered health insurance, and that is compared to 90 percent of people in full-time jobs. If you look at health insurance from all

sources, only one-in-five part-timers have no coverage from any

source.

As I have stated earlier, more families are finding it necessary

to have two incomes to support themselves, and many of the

choices that they are supposed to have come with serious consequences. I sometimes think of it as ticking time bombs on those

choices. For example, if you work part time, when you get ready

to retire you may not have a pension or enough money to retire,

or you may have no access to health insurance. Or if you stay home

with your kids, it’s really hard to sequence back to work.

We also study what employers have done for employees, and

there are many, many companies that have embraced change and

have embraced the need to provide workplace flexibility. So you

might ask, what’s the problem?

Well, it is only 43 percent of U.S. employees who have access to

flextime, and when they do, 68 percent of men use it and 79 percent of women use it. It is not just an issue for working parents;

it is not just an issue for women. But again, as I mentioned, only

two-in-five employees have this kind of access.

Thirty-seven percent of employees say it is very hard to take

time off from work during the day if a personal or family issue

arises, and although many companies have made strides to embrace flexibility, many, many employees don’t have this kind of

flexibility.

For those of us who are parents, we know what happens when

one of our kids gets sick. It’s a house of cards that comes tumbling

down. Fifty-four percent of employees with children said that they

can’t take time off from work to care for their sick children without
6

either losing pay or making up some excuse, like pretending they

are sick themselves.

With all of the advances in technology, one would think that

working at home is far more common than it is, other than bringing work home, which most everyone does. But only 11 percent of

employees work at home on a regular basis, and 43 percent of employees would like to.

So the question is, how do we continue to merge employees’

needs with those of their employers? One of the most profound

findings from this nationally representative study, ‘‘When Work

Works’’, is that 79 percent of all employees want more flexibility—

men, women, parents, nonparents, people with and without elder

care responsibilities, people at different levels of earning, people in

all different kinds of industries and jobs.

But wanting flexibility, being offered flexibility, and actually

using flexibility are three completely different things. This is because, even for those who have it, there is a perceived penalty that

is associated with its use. We found that 39 percent, two-in-five

employees, think that if they use flexibility that they would jeopardize their advancement. Employees want flexibility, but they

want it without jeopardy.

Now, does this sound like an employee advocacy position? It is

actually not. In the 2002 national study of the changing workforce,

we looked at a number of potential predictors of an effective workplace. Flexibility turns out—and I think this is a big surprise of our

findings—to be as key ingredient of an effective workplace, with

other things that one might expect, like learning opportunities or

support from your boss or coworkers for your work success.

In organizations that do have a high level of flexibility, 66 percent of employees report that they are very engaged and committed

to their jobs, and we all know how important it is for employees

to be able to go that extra mile to help their organization succeed.

In organizations that have a high level of flexibility, 72 percent

of employees plan to remain with their employer for the next year.

We know again the cost of turnover is very high. The investment

in recruitment, training and replacement of personnel all decrease

significantly when there is flexibility.

Flexibility is even linked with better mental health. We consider

that particularly important because our national study finds that

one-in-three employees is reporting one or more symptoms of clinical depression, and we know the cost associated with that.

Now, there was an article, for those of you who read USA Today,

about the SAS company, a model employer for providing these kind

of benefits. The article was particularly interesting because it

talked about the fact that, even during a difficult period for technology companies, SAS has done real well. They have continued to

hire workers; they have a very, very, very low turnover rate; and

they resisted the urge to go public during the .com bubble. What

USA Today says, if they do ever go public, Wall Street will call for

them to cut back on all of these so-called perks.

Well, I think that they have it wrong, because there are a lot of

companies that are public that are finding, even in public companies, that you don’t have to be private and it has the same kind

of benefits. You will hear from two of those later, from JPMorgan
7

Chase and IBM. The financial reports are showing that they are

in good shape.

So we understand that change is tough, but the old workplace

doesn’t fit the new workforce and the new economy. Work is something that we all value. It is more evident than ever, that when

work ‘‘works,’’ both employees and employers prosper.

I suggest a three-pronged approach to address these issues: engage in study, take action, and raise awareness. Engaging in study,

I would recommend that a high level commission be established on

how to make work ‘‘work’’. It should include very senior representatives of government, business and unions. It should take a fresh

look—and I think I would underline the ‘‘fresh’’—at some of the undercover but critically important issues of today, particularly the

high level of workplace stress and its impact on families and on

children, and the attendant health care repercussions and cost. I

would like to see this commission come up with recommendations

for action and an implementation plan.

Second, I recommend that the funding of innovative pilots and

programs be established. These should include rigorous assessments of the results of these interventions that address some of the

tough issues on workplace flexibility, such as the need to remove

barriers. I think this is particularly important. As the workforce

ages, we need to help those more-than-one-in-two older workers

who want part-time but would jeopardize their pension or their retirement if they do so.

We need to provide health care for part-timers, to provide short

leaves for parents of sick children, and we need to establish flex careers for people, the one-in-four women who want to take time out

of the workforce. The opting out notion is real. But they do come

back to work, and we need to help them with the on ramps so that

they can sequence back to work.

These options also need to include fathers, those who need leave

when they have teenagers, elder care responsibilities, compassion

care responsibilities and so forth.

Finally, raise awareness. I recommend a campaign to raise

awareness about how to change the workforce to address 21st century challenges and opportunities, and especially to reduce the conflict that millions feel.

Thank you very much for this opportunity to testify, to give voice

to these issues, and to share our strong research finding that solutions that meet the needs of business and of working families are

not only possible, but imperative.

Senator ALEXANDER. If the people want access to your research,

your new report, how do they get it?

Ms. GALINSKY. We have a website called ‘‘When Work Works’’,

and it’s whenworkworks.org. Everything is on the website and

downloadable. We have also brought copies that are on the side tables.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you very much. We will look forward

to talking more about it.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Galinsky follows:]
8

PREPARED STATEMENT OF ELLEN GALINSKY

The workplace today is not our father’s workplace. No longer are whistles that

signal the start and end of the workday commonplace. No longer are photos of our

family members at work the sole symbol of our lives outside of work. No longer is

loyalty to employers an automatic promise of a job for life.

A sea change has occurred over the past decades that has affected our families,

our society, our economy, our competitiveness, and our global presence. Technology

has blurred the lines between work and home. The economy has become global and

24/7. New phrases have entered our vocabularies such as the time squeeze, the time

crunch and, I am tempted to say, it goes from ‘‘feeling overworked’’ to ‘‘you’re fired.’’

Families and Work Institute conducts the largest and most comprehensive study

of the U.S. workforce addressing issues of life on and off the job. Our National Study

of the Changing Workforce surveys representative samples of the Nation’s workforce

every 5 years. We have the most robust data available on U.S. workers from 1992,

1997, and 2002. Prior to Families and Work Institute assuming this leadership role,

the U.S. Department of Labor conducted The 1977 Quality of Employment Survey,

with a number of parallel questions that make historical comparisons possible. We

hope we can tell you just about anything you want to know about changes in the

workforce over the past 25 years.

The most recent report from the National Study with findings on flexibility is the

focus of my testimony today and will also be the focus of upcoming business forums

in eight communities in partnership with the Center For Workforce Preparation, an

affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Center for Emerging Futures,

through funding from the Sloan Foundation. There are so many key findings in this

report, When Work Works, funded by IBM, that we would be here far too long if

we were to review them in detail, but I would like to set the stage by sharing some

data that we believe reflect the world according to U.S. employees.

• The majority of employees (67 percent) say they don’t have enough time with

their children. The majority of employees (63 percent) say they don’t have enough

time with their spouses. The majority of employees (55 percent) also say they don’t

have enough time for themselves. Before I proceed, I would like to remind you that

our data are representative of U.S. employees. They work in all levels of jobs, from

gas stations to corner offices, and reflect the genuine diversity of our country.

• The 40-hour workweek is also not a reality. Men work an average of 49 hours

per week and women work an average of 43.5 hours per week, and that figure includes the one-in-four women who work part time. Fourteen percent of employees

have more than one job. Sixty-one percent of employees—men and women alike—

want to work fewer hours than they do.

• Seventy-eight percent of families in 2002 are comprised of dual-income earners.

Only 33 percent of fathers are the sole wage earners today, versus 51 percent in

1977. For dual-earner couples with children, combined work hours are now 91 hours

per week, up from 81 hours per week in 1977.

• Forty-five percent of today’s employees feel pulled and stretched thin between

their responsibilities at work and at home. In my book Ask the Children, a nationally representative group of children ages 8 to 18 were asked for their number one

wish to improve their lives. The largest proportion wished that their parents were

less tired and stressed, and one-in-three young people feels very stressed themselves.

Listening to the data I just presented, one might think, ‘‘Why don’t these employees just make a change? Why don’t they adjust their lives? After all this is America,

and we believe in choice.’’

This is where the disconnect becomes evident. Employees do not feel they have a

choice or can make these changes.

• Thirty-seven percent of part-time employees prefer to be working full-time, however, if you look at employees who are 60 years or older, 57 percent of them prefer

to work part-time.

• Health insurance, as we all know, is of huge concern to many in our country

and is a major consideration in employment and job choice. Only 40 percent of employees in part-time positions are offered health insurance, while 90 percent of employees in full-time positions are offered health insurance. One in five part-timers

doesn’t have health insurance from any source.

As I have stated earlier, more families are finding it necessary to have two incomes to support themselves and so many of the so-called choices families have

come with serious consequences—for example, if you work part-time, you may have

little or no money to retire on and no access to health insurance, or if you stay home

with your children, you may have a very hard time sequencing back to work.
9

Families and Work Institute also studies what employers have done for employees

and there are many, many, many companies that have embraced change and have

embraced the need to provide workplace flexibility. So, one might ask, what’s the

problem? • Of the 43 percent of employees who have access to flextime, 68 percent of men

use it, and 79 percent of women use it. But only two in five employees have this

access. • Thirty-seven percent of employees say it is hard to take time off during the

workday when personal or family issues arise. Although companies have made

strides to change and embrace flexibility, there are many employees who are still

struggling to make it work. • For those of us who are parents who work, we know how difficult it is when

a child is sick. Fifty-four percent of wage and salaried employees with children say

they can’t take time off to care for sick children without losing pay, having to use

vacation days, or pretending they are sick themselves. • With all the technology advancements that have been made, only 11 percent of

wage and salaried employees work at home, but 43 percent would like to be able

to do so.

So the question becomes, how do we continue to merge employees’ needs with

those of their employers?

One of the most profound findings in our most recent study, When Work

Works, is that 79 percent of all employees would like more flexibility. This

includes men, women, parents, nonparents, employees with and without elder care

responsibilities, employees at different earning levels, employees in goods-producing

industries and service industries.

Wanting flexibility, being offered flexibility, and actually using flexibility are

three completely different things. This is because, even for those who have access

to it, there is a perceived penalty associated with its use. Thirty-nine percent of employees believe that using flexibility would jeopardize their career advancement. So

obviously employees want flexibility without jeopardy. But does promoting flexibility

become an employee advocacy position? Not at all!

In the 2002 National Study of the Changing Workforce, we examined a number

of potential predictors of an effective workplace. Flexibility turns out, perhaps surprisingly, to be a key ingredient, along with learning opportunities and the support

of supervisors and coworkers.

• In organizations that have high levels of flexibility, 66 percent of employees report high levels of job engagement and commitment. We all know how important

it is for employers to have employees who are willing to go that extra mile to help

their organizations succeed.

• In organizations that have high levels of flexibility, 72 percent of employees

plan to remain with their employers for the next year. Retaining employees has direct cost advantages for business. The investment in recruitment, the investment

in training, and the investment in replacement of personnel all decrease significantly.

• Flexibility is even linked with better mental health.

Conclusion

We understand that change is tough. But the old workplace doesn’t fit the new

workforce and the new economy. Work is a value that Americans hold dear. It is

more evident than ever that when work ‘‘works,’’ employees and employers prosper.

I suggest a three-pronged approach to address these issues: engage in study, take

action, and raise awareness.

1. Engage in Study. I recommend that a high-level commission be established

on how to make work ‘‘work.’’ It would include very senior representatives of government, business, and unions. It would take a fresh look at some of the undercover,

but critically important issues of today, especially the high level of workplace stress,

its impact on families and work, and the attendant health care repercussions and

cost. This commission would come up with recommendations for action and an implementation plan.

2. Take action. I recommend the funding of innovative pilots and programs that

include rigorous assessments of the results of these interventions that address some

of the tough issues in workplace flexibility such as:

• the need to remove some of the barriers, including the pension barriers, to enable the 57 percent of older workers who want to work part-time do so;

• the need to provide health care for part-timers;

• the need to provide short leaves for parents of sick children;

• the need to provide flexible career options for the one-in-four women who want

to take time out of the workforce when they have children and the provision of on-
10

ramps that enable them to sequence back to work. These options also need to include fathers and others who need leaves when they have teenagers, elder care responsibilities, compassion care responsibilities and so forth.

3. Raise awareness. I recommend a campaign to raise awareness about how to

change the workplace to address 21st century challenges and opportunities and especially to reduce the conflict between work and family that millions now feel.

Thank you very much for this opportunity to give voice to these issues and to

share our findings that solutions that meet the needs of business and of working

families are not only possible, but imperative.

Senator ALEXANDER. Ms. Kornbluh.

Ms. KORNBLUH. Thank you. Good morning.

Thank you very much for your leadership in holding this hearing,

Chairman Alexander, and also for bringing both your private sector

and government leadership to shine the spotlight on the critical

issues facing parents raising children. I know that Senator Dodd

isn’t here, but he has demonstrated also, continuing leadership in

creating new policies to help children and families, and this committee has played an important historical role in these issues as

well.

At the New America Foundation, we collaborate very closely with

the Families and Work Institute, and you will hear some echoes of

what Ellen said in my remarks as well. Like them, we receive

funding from the Sloan Foundation for our work on flexibility.

I believe that the timing of this hearing is very fortunate. The

stresses on families at the dawn of the new century are too great

and too widespread. Far too many mothers must choose every day

between staying at home with a sick child or keeping their jobs.

Too many fathers must choose between seeing their children at all

when they’re awake, or holding on to health insurance. And too

many parents, as you know from your private sector experience,

must choose between child care that they can’t afford or leaving

their children home alone with TV as their only babysitter. These

are the kinds of choices that no parent should have to make, and

yet they are the kinds of choices parents make every day in this

wealthy Nation of ours.

Our main message is this: that these stresses can no longer be

seen as merely private problems that can be solved by individual

families and employers acting on their own. First, they affect too

many children, families and employers; second, they are caused in

part by antiquated policies that need reform; and third, despite the

enormous strides that have been made by many employers—and

you will hear about those today—and the strides that will be made

in the future, thanks to the work of Ellen and Donna and Working

Mother, these problems will not be able to solve themselves for all

employees.

We find that families themselves are finally beginning to identify

the need for change. We have just gotten back some polling results

and we are analyzing them, but we can see already that Americans

are worried about economic security and they are worried about

the time that parents have to spend with their children. These are

not either/or issues for them. They don’t want to sacrifice either.

Just to give you a taste of that, 76 percent of likely voters said

that they feel it is hard for families to earn enough to pay their

bills and still have time to care for their families. And 70 percent

think that this problem has gotten worse.
11

In my brief testimony I will provide a short historical context, describe the Catch 22 many parents find themselves in, and suggest

very briefly some directions for a forum. You, Mr. Chairman, provided the context, I think, very well, but the American family

changed dramatically over the last decades of the 20th century,

and the way we characterize it is that, instead of a breadwinner,

and a homemaker, we have new juggler parents, parents who

themselves have to take care of both work and family. They have

new responsibilities that the workers of yesterday didn’t have.

This change in the family has taken place in the context of a

very new economy. Once a worker might expect to work 40 hours

a week for 40 years for a single employer, and this employee would

find that his employer could provide security for this family

through retirement. But today, instead of these company men,

many employees have become global free agents. They switch employers every 5 years, nearly one-quarter are what we call nonstandard temp workers, part-time, freelance, and they are competing with workers around the globe for wages and benefits.

The new parents and employees are caught in a Catch 22. They

have to choose, as Ellen has described, between inflexible full-time

jobs, created for the breadwinner, or company man of old, or parttime jobs with a high penalty. Because of the lack of flexible mainstream jobs, parents often buy flexibility by coddling together these

nonstandard jobs, part-time jobs, temp jobs, or contract work, but

doing so imposes a penalty because these jobs are not subject to the

same rules as full-time regular jobs and so are likely to offer lower

hourly wages, benefits, and job security.

Obviously, it doesn’t have to be this way. Now that we’re in the

21st century, it seems that it shouldn’t be that parents have to

choose between security and flexibility. Why not be able to have

the security of a full-time job and the flexibility of a part-time job?

After all, one of the watch words of the 21st century global economy is supposed to be flexibility.

Just very briefly, to give a little more history, the economics of

the family has shifted. Before, as recently as 100 years ago, most

families lived on a farm and were moving to the factory and the

office. But on the farm, both parents and the children had worked,

and they had an assert that provided their income, the farm. When

they moved into jobs where the family became dependent on a single bread-winner’s earnings, if that breadwinner was fired or became disabled or retired, the entire family’s economic security was

at risk. So eventually the country responded with a series of programs to provide that family with economic security—things like

disability insurance, unemployment insurance, Social Security.

Many of these old policies, the purpose of them still make sense,

providing family economic security. But the design of them was

around the company man, the breadwinner and the homemaker.

What we are urging is to look at these policies, not abandon them,

but reform them for the new era.

To go into the health care issue that Ellen brought up, because

of the way we deliver health care in this country, which is through

employers, it provides a high fixed cost for an employer to provide

health care for an employee. That means the incentive is to work
12

that employee as long as possible. In other words, it creates a disincentive to do job sharing or part-time options.

In addition, as you know, there is no minimum requirement for

sick or vacation leave. Almost half of the employees in the private

sector do not have paid sick leave. There is a new study out today,

I believe, by the Urban Institute, that shows those who need family

medical leave the most are the least likely to have access.

You and your staff, I know, are already working on an agenda

of reform, but I just wanted to touch on some areas that you might

consider. One is that to create family-friendly mainstream jobs,

government has to help industry with knowledge and resources. I

think the work that your other witnesses are going to do, and have

done, before this hearing and will do after this hearing, will help

to do this. But I think the Government can use its bully pulpit and

other tools very effectively here as well.

For instance, work with industry to create a national award, to

build on the Sloan awards that are going to be provided in the

eight cities to best practice companies, to build on the Working

Mother magazine 100 best companies list. AARP also has a company award. There is a Malcolm Baldrige award that currently exists for high quality companies, one for flexible companies that

work well with their employers.

The Commerce Department could provide research into how

flexibility can improve the bottom line, so that managers have better tools to understand how to evaluate employees besides how long

they have sat in their chair. Also, technical assistance. There have

been these manufacturing extension centers that help manufacturing companies improve their quality, while technical assistance

could help small companies understand what the largest companies

have been doing to implement flexible workplace practices.

Then, of course, tax incentives could help some companies who

are reluctant to get started because of the perceived risks.

In addition, I think paid sick and family and medical leave are

a necessary part of employing what Ellen has called a ‘‘whole person’’. I understand that there are concerns about, in a global economy, adding to the cost of employing people, so I think a full discussion could look at whether general revenues could be used or

other means to offset some of those costs. But, I don’t think we

want to stop the conversation before it gets started.

It is also essential to mainstreaming flexible workers to find a

way for part-time, temp, and contingent workers to obtain access

to health care and private pension at affordable rates, and with the

tax incentives that self-employed workers have and that full-time

regular employees who get health benefits are provided.

Then, of course, we should bring education out of the agricultural

age, make preschool and after school available, and work on making quality child care more affordable.

I have also proposed creating new nest egg accounts that would

help families save for the various expenses they incur, because running in this 21st century global economy with a fraying social insurance system, families might use these accounts to offset the cost

of child care to replace income that they lose when they go parttime.
13

1 U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

2 National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP (2004) Caregiving in the U.S. 3Mishel et al. (2003) The State of Working America 2002/2003. Economic Policy Institute.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Wenger, Jeffrey (2003) Share of Workers in ‘Nonstandard’

Jobs Declines. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.

Finally, Senator Patrick Daniel Moynihan used to urge passage

of a national family policy, like the national employment policy

that led to the creation of the economic report of the President that

is produced by the Council of Economic Advisors. And a national

family policy could similarly produce an annual report, presenting

data on family well-being that would provide a valuable benchmark

for policy making.

Thank you very much for your leadership on these issues. I look

forward to your questions.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Kornbluh follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF KAREN KORNBLUH

Good morning. Thank you for your leadership in holding this hearing, Chairman

Alexander, and for bringing your private sector and government leadership to shine

the spotlight on the critical issues facing parents raising children. Thank you Senator Dodd for your continuing leadership in creating new policies to help children

and families.

My name is Karen Kornbluh, director of the Work and Family Program at the

New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy institute here in Washington. The

Work and Family Program is a new program created for the express purpose of

bringing together research with public education to create a sense of urgency around

issues of work and family.

We created this program for the same reason you are holding this hearing. The

stresses on families at the dawn of the new century are too great—and too widespread. These stresses can no longer be seen as merely private problems that can

be solved by individual families and employers acting on their own. They affect too

many children, families and communities; they are caused in part by antiquated

policies; and commonsense policy reform could help.

The timing of this hearing is appropriate. Families are finally beginning to identify the need for change. We are in the process of analyzing new poll results on

these issues that we have not yet released. We can report that 76 percent of likely

voters feel that it is hard for families to earn enough to pay their bills and still have

time to care for their families. And 70 percent of likely voters think that this has

gotten worse. They are worried about the children in these families especially. And

they believe that reforms—including reforms that would make flexibility possible

without sacrificing economic security—would ease the stress. We should be optimistic about the prospect for a commonsense agenda that addresses the ability of parents to spend more time with their families.

Historical Context

The American family changed dramatically over the last decades of the twentieth

century. In 1960, 70 percent of families had a parent home full-time. Today, this

is reversed. Fully 70 percent of families with children are headed by two working

parents or by an unmarried working parent.1 The new ‘‘juggler parent’’ has responsibility for both making ends meet and caring for the family. And this family can

now include elderly relatives—over 21 percent of households have at least one individual who had cared for a relative or friend over age 50 in the past year. Of those

caregivers, 59 percent have worked and managed caregiving responsibilities at the

same time.2

This change in the family has taken place in the context of—and to some degree

as a result of—changes in the economy. Once a worker might expect to work 40

hours a week for 40 years for a single employer. Today global competition, communications technology, streamlining, and deindustrialization mean many employees

are ‘‘free agents’’—on average, they switch employers every 5 years and nearly onequarter are ‘‘nonstandard’’ (e.g. temp, part-time, free-lance, contingent, day labor,

on-call or self-employed).3 The 21st Century economy offers a high premium on employees’ human capital. But it offers less security from a paternalistic employer-employee relationship.
14

4The Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisors (2000) Economic Report of the President. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office. 5 Bianchi, Suzanne (2000) ‘‘Maternal Employment and Time with Children: Dramatic Change

or Surprising Continuity?’’ Demography, 37 (4). 6 Barnett, Rosalind Chait & Gareis, Karen (2004) Parental After-School Stress Project. Community, Families & Work Program, Brandeis University, summary available: http://

www.bcfwp.org/PASS Findings.pdf. 7 Bond et al. (2002) The National Study of the Changing Workforce. New York: The Families

and Work Institute. 8Families and Work Institute (2004) Workplace Flexibility: What is it? Who has it? Who Wants

it? Does it Make a Difference? New York: Families and Work Institute. 9Waldfogel, Jane (1998) ‘‘Understanding the ‘‘Family Gap’’ in Pay for Women and Children’’

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12 (1).

The economics of the family has shifted before. As recently as 100 years ago, most

families lived on a farm. Both parents—and the children—worked at home. The

family owned an important asset that supported them into old age. The change from

the agricultural family to the industrial era breadwinner-homemaker family meant

that suddenly the father left the home to work at a factory or office. The family was

dependent on the father’s wages. If he became disabled, was fired, or retired, the

family lost its sole means of support. The Nation responded eventually with a set

of laws designed to give this industrial-era family economic security: disability insurance, unemployment insurance, Social Security, the 40-hour workweek and then

taxpayer-subsidized health insurance and pension benefits.

A Societal Problem

Today’s parents face a new set of challenges. Let’s face it. There are only 24 hours

in a day. Children need someone to raise them—preferably during the day when

they are awake. Employers want employees to be focused on the job. In a nation

where child care is the responsibility of the individual, most parents work, and

workplaces are inflexible, something has to give.

Parents have not looked to Washington to solve their problems. Parenting and

giving your family security are viewed as private concerns; as is negotiating time

off with your employer.

But today, the tensions created by the needs of the new family and inadequate

societal response are creating problems for children, families and communities

across the Nation. Americans today have 22 fewer hours a week to spend with their

kids than they did in 1969.4 Millions of children are left in unlicensed day care

every day—or at home alone with the TV as a babysitter. Employed mothers lose

almost an hour of sleep a day in their attempt to make it all add up.5 Recent data

show that parents with school age children show high signs of stress—stress that

has an impact on their productivity and work—when they have inflexible jobs and

unstable after-school care.6

Parents are caught in a Catch 22. Full-time jobs, with benefits and higher wages,

tend to be inflexible and have long hours. Fifty-seven percent of workers have no

control over starting and end times.7 Fifty-four percent of wage and salaried workforce with children say they have no time off to care for sick children without losing

pay, having to use vacation days, or fabricating an excuse.8 This is untenable for

many parents—especially those lacking adequate child care or after-school options.

But the alternative is often part-time or other flexible work that puts them at economic jeopardy: it comes with lower hourly wages, no benefits and little job security.

Researchers have identified a well-established parent penalty. The gap between

men’s and women’s wages is 10 to 15 percent larger for women with children than

for women without children.9 There is no real alternative that allows parents to

work in good, mainstream jobs with some control over their hours.

For all parents, this is a difficult struggle. You often feel you are not doing anything well—not your work or raising your children. But, despite—or maybe because—of the near universality of the struggle, the media and many professionals

tend to trivialize the issue or assume it away. Because professionals often find a

way to make it all work out—as a result of a forgiving boss, a stay-at-home neighbor, company-run emergency day-care or even bringing a child to the office—they

assume that all Americans can. But it is a mistake to generalize from the experiences of workers with a great deal of leverage who work for well-financed companies

to the rest of the workforce.

Take the snow days this past winter, as an example. Professional parents had it

tough. They had to reschedule conference calls, cancel meetings, call-in sick. But,

outside this rarified world, the vast majority of families faced a far less tolerant reality.
15

10See Grover, S. & Crooker K. (1995) ‘‘Who appreciates family-responsive human resources

policies: The impact of family-friendly policies on the organizational attachment of parents and

nonparents.’’ Personnel Psychology, 48; Bailyn, L. & Fletcher, J.K. (1997) ‘‘Unexpected connections: Considering employees’ personal lives can revitalize your business.’’ Sloan Management

Review, 38; Bond et al. (2002) The National Study of the Changing Workforce. New York: The

Families and Work Institute; and McCampbell, A. (1996) ‘‘Benefits achieved through alternative

work schedules.’’ Human Resources Planning, 19 (3). 11Golden, Lonnie (2000) The Time Bandit: What U.S. workers surrender to get greater flexibility in work schedules. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. 12Pitt-Catsouphes, Marcie and Litchfield, Leon (2001) ‘‘How are Small Businesses Responding

to Work and Family Issues?’’ in Working Families: The Transformation of the American Home,

Rosanna Hertz and Nancy L. Marshall, ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, Berkeley. CA. 13Wenger, Jeffrey (2003) Share of Workers in ‘Nonstandard’ Jobs Declines. Washington, DC:

Economic Policy Institute.

For the single mother with a job as a part-time security guard, or the married

medical technician at the local hospital, the shift starts on time, whether school

opens or not. If she doesn’t show up for work, she could lose her job. And, if she

loses a paycheck, she could lose family health insurance as well. If she goes to work,

who watches her children? Her neighbors and family have child care responsibilities

of their own.

These are the kinds of choices no parent should have to make.

Yet, they are the kinds of choices parents make every day in this wealthy Nation

of ours.

Part of the reason that parents must make these choices is that antiquated policies prevent workplaces from offering the kinds of flexibility necessary.

Antiquated Policy Helps Cause the Problem

As Ellen Galinsky points out in her important new research, flexibility should be

the watchword of 21st Century business. Recent management books with titles like

The Future of Work and The Seven-Day Weekend argue that new communications

and management tools make it possible for employees to have more autonomy.

And in fact, a number of studies find that giving employees access to flexible work

arrangements can be positive for the bottom line—in terms of employee commitment, reduced absenteeism, and increased employee retention.10

But we should not be complacent that all businesses will get there—for all workers—on their own. As of yet, as The Families and Work Institute points out, employers tend to neglect the fact that their employees are whole people, with lives outside

of work. There is already a tendency for flexible arrangements and benefits to be

more available in larger and more profitable firms, and then to the most valued professional and managerial worker.11 Small companies are less likely to offer both formal and informal policies and programs to help employees balance work and family.

They report work/family issues occurring at least every other day but presumably

lack the resources or the knowledge to respond in a way that would reduce the tensions. 12

In addition, there are policies that stand in the way—policies that were put in

place to help provide security to families, but that now contribute to their lack of

security.

For example, because of the way we deliver health care and private pensions in

the U.S., employers who provide these benefits face a high fixed-cost per employee.

This creates a disincentive to offer job-sharing or part-time options—employers

would prefer to work those employees as many hours as possible rather than hiring

two workers.

Conversely, parents often ‘‘buy’’ flexibility by cobbling together part-time, temp or

contract work—but doing so imposes a large penalty beyond the direct effect of

working fewer hours. These jobs are not subject to the same rules as full-time regular jobs and so are likely to offer lower hourly wages, benefits and job security. As

a result, only 14 percent of nonstandard workers have their own health insurance,

compared to 69 percent of full-time workers in standard work arrangements. Sixteen percent of nonstandard workers receive pension benefits through their employer, in comparison with 66 percent of regular full-time workers. In terms of

wages, regular part-time workers earn $3.97 less per hour than regular full-time

workers.13 And so the very people whom the safety net should protect—those who

are raising children and the children themselves—are left out.
16

14Smolensky, Eugene and Gootman, Jennifer Appleton, ed. (2003) Working Families and

Growing Kids: Caring for Children and Adolescents. Washington, DC: The National Academies

Press. 15 Heymann, Jody (2000) The Widening Gap. New York: Basic Books. 16Schulman, Karen (2000) The High Cost of Child Care Puts Quality Care Out of Reach for

Many Families. Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund.

There is no minimum requirement for sick or vacation leave. Almost half (47 percent) of employees in the private sector do not have paid sick leave.14 Thirteen percent of nonpoor workers with caregiving responsibilities lack paid vacation leave,

and 28 percent of poor working caregivers lack any paid vacation time. 15 Thanks

to the Family and Medical Leave Act, full-time employees can take up to 12 weeks

of family and medical leave, but this leave is unpaid and applies only to workers

at firms with 50 or more employees.

There are real worries about asking employers or employees to pay for this leave

through an increase in taxes on employees. But this shouldn’t stop the discussion.

This kind of leave is essential in the 21st Century and society can find a way to

pay for it.

The Fair Labor Standards Act applies the 40-hour workweek to only part of the

workforce. For everyone else the workweek seems to have become 24x7. There has

been a great debate in Congress about which employees are covered by these provisions and whether they can or should be able to take ‘‘comp-time’’ instead of timeand-a-half for overtime. But there has been little debate in the Nation about a culture that often puts jobs and the needs of the workplace above all else—including

the well being of our children and communities.

For most families, it is difficult if not impossible to find affordable, quality child

care. It can cost a family from $4,000–$10,000 per year, per child—without tuition

assistance.16 Pre-K and after-school are far from universally available. The education day and year remain on an agricultural schedule.

Directions for Reform

You and your staffs are already working on an agenda of reform to increase the

options available to employers and families. Here are some suggestions for areas

you might consider.

Family-Friendly Full-Time. In order to make full-time jobs more flexible, we

need to start by spreading the gospel that Ellen Galinsky has preached. The government and business leaders have a history of helping to spread best practice throughout industry. In the 1980s, American companies embraced higher quality standards.

At first, they were reluctant. Spending on training employees, giving them more

control and fixing processes would cost money. But business leaders, business

schools, new institutions like the Council on Competitiveness and even government

programs like the Manufacturing Extension Centers, the Advanced Technology Program and the Malcolm Balderidge awards helped them to realize that improvements

to the bottom line result when the product quality is higher. Today, private sector

leaders are beginning to carry the message that to operate in America in the 21st

Century you will have to and you will be able to give employees more autonomy.

They will have to incorporate flexibility over work hours into this message. The government can help.

• National Award. A new nationwide award to recognize excellence in providing

employees more workplace flexibility would shine attention on the problem and best

practices.

• Research. The Commerce Department could fund research into new ways for

employers to measure employee performance and loyalty—other than hours in the

chair.

• Technical Assistance. Outreach programs at Commerce Department and Small

Business Administration can help companies realize that workplace flexibility is

win-win for the workforce of the new century and give them new methods for allowing flexibility for different kinds of workers by sharing best practices.

• Tax Incentives. Tax credits akin to the telecommuting tax credit would help employers get started by removing some of the perceived risks of allowing employees

to work flexibly. A pilot project—combined with the technical assistance—would

allow for study of the effectiveness of such a credit.

• Leave. Americans need the flexibility to take time off for a new child; when the

worker, a child, or a parent is ill; or to participate in family life. This is a necessary

part of employing a ‘‘whole person.’’ In a 21st century, global economy, it is important to discuss whether using general revenues can be used to offset some of the

costs to employers and employees.
17

Reducing the Part-Time Penalty. Workers who need flexibility must be

‘‘mainstreamed’’—rather than shunted into an economic ghetto. This will require a

cultural change. It also means making some of the benefits for health insurance and

pensions available to part-time, temp, and contingent workers.

Bring Education out of the Agricultural Age. Pre-K and after-school should

be universally available. The dependent care tax credit should be dramatically expanded and made refundable. In addition, all employees should be able to use the

flexible spending accounts available to upper income workers at certain companies.

Nest Egg Accounts. In a 21st Century economy, families are working harder

with greater risk. New tax-preferred account would allow families to save for the

various expenses they incur as soon as they make the commitment to raise a child.

These accounts could be used to help offset the dip in earnings families suffer when

one parent switches from full to part-time.

Data Collection. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan urged passage of a national

family policy that would make it clear that the government should worry about the

impact of its policies on families—of all kinds. The national employment policy led

to the Economic Report of the President, produced by the Council of Economic Advisors. A new family policy could lead to a similar report presenting to Congress and

the Nation the economic, family and child well-being of the American family, providing a benchmark for policymaking.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you very much, and thank you especially for the historical perspective. We can always learn from history.

Your point in going back to the agricultural age, when families

worked together and worked in the same place basically, which is

a lot of what we’re discussing here. We are discussing the workplace and families. So we were having this discussion 100 years

ago. We might still be having it, but the workplace would be the

same place that the family lives, and the responsibilities were divided, I guess, in a very stereotypical way then between the father

and the mother and the kids, all of whom worked. But it was a

very different set of situations. Then the World War II situation,

which I mentioned earlier, was a reminder that, when we have to,

we can make sudden adjustments and support families in the

workplace.

What I would like to do in a few minutes of questions is focus

on the job of being a parent. It’s a little bit different way of talking

and thinking about a family-friendly workplace, and it is not the

only issue in a family-friendly workplace.

In thinking of history for just a moment, my sense of things is

that a half century ago we placed a higher value in this country

on the job of being a parent, that taxes were lower, neighborhoods

were safer, the family structure was somewhat different. I suppose

one reason might be that there were more people working at the

job of being a parent.

Isn’t there some dramatic change in the last 50 years between

the percentage of Americans who are parents and the percentage

of Americans who aren’t? Do either of you have those statistics?

Ms. GALINSKY. I do, but I have them back there. But in the workforce itself, the percentage of people who are parents is much

lower, and that is because the workforce is aging and the number

of children has gone down a bit.

But, what I think we have seen is we have moved from a sense

where your job defines you, your job is your identity, your job is

your value, your job means you’re important. Particularly after 9/

11, polls are showing people being much more family oriented, so

I think this puts the people in kind of a double bind, because it is

clear that you should pay attention to your priorities, that life is
18

more fragile than we used to think it was, and at the same time

people are very worried about losing their jobs. So, it is hard to act

on your values.

I feel like there is almost this dual going on inside of people, men

as well as women. The national study of the changing workforce

has shown a huge increase in father involvement. The time that

mothers spend with their children and the time that fathers spend

with their children on workdays has narrowed considerably to

about 48 minutes between them. Fathers have increased their time

considerably in the last 25 years. Thirty percent of mothers report

that either they and their spouse take equal responsibility for their

children, or that the husband takes more. So, that’s one out of

three.

This is very much—although women tend to take the major responsibility for children, and that remains true. You do see fathers

increasingly wanting to be part of their children’s lives, not to come

home and hide behind the paper. They are much more involved and

they care more. So, this is an issue for men and women.

But, they are battling within themselves. You know, the dual

earner role, there’s a provide for your family role and the take care

of your family role.

Senator ALEXANDER. Ms. Kornbluh.

Ms. KORNBLUH. The only thing I would add to that is that it is

harder for families to get ahead right now, that we had dramatic

increases in median income for families in the decades right after

the war. That slowed dramatically. So, I think parents have been

throwing more and more hours on the fire in order to keep their

families’ income increasing, as the American dream would say they

want to. So, I think that really lends itself to what Ellen is talking

about, that if you believe your job is to give your child a better economic future than you had yourself, that means you and your

spouse—or just you if you’re a single parent—have to work harder

and harder. And, because these jobs don’t come in bite-sized pieces,

that can often mean dramatic increases in work.

But, I don’t want to underestimate, I think the economic issues

are terribly important, but I don’t want to underestimate the noneconomic issues that you may be alluding to.

I just noticed a headline that said alcohol advertising is way up,

directed to children, and I think there are a number of other things

going on in society, you know, that are separate from these economic issues. People value their children but, of course, it has become difficult to place those values in context with commercial values.

Senator ALEXANDER. We heard a great deal over the last 15

years as we entered the so-called ‘‘information age,’’ that this would

create a sort of revolution that might be helpful, in that more people would be able to work at home and that would mean there

would be less conflict between the workplace and the place where

one lives when the job of being a parent comes up. You mentioned

a little bit about that.

What did you find out about that? Are we finding that one or

both parents are able to work at home as a way of spending more

time as a parent or not?
19

Ms. GALINSKY. Well, two percent of employees work at home as

their regular place of employment. That is their main place of employment. I’m talking about wage and salary people, people who

work for someone else. Nine percent spent part of every week

working at home. It is regularly scheduled time at home. So, it is

89 percent who don’t and 11 percent who do.

I actually looked at the impact of tele-work on children in the

‘‘ask the children’’ studies, and I found some interesting results. In

many ways, it is really quite wonderful. But, because you are right

there, it also can be hard. You can feel more pulled. There are no

barriers between should you do this for work or should you sit

down at the kitchen table and help your kids with their homework.

So, I found mothers and fathers reporting high levels of conflict between their work and family life.

The kids, when I looked at the kids, did not see that in their

mothers. They felt that their mothers were really there for them,

in kid speak, in kids language. But, they did feel that their fathers—they could feel the tension in their fathers, which is interesting, because both mothers and fathers felt that mothers seemed

to be able to shift focus and focus on their kids. So, it is an incredible solution, but it also depends on how you handle it. That is, you

have to decide what your boundaries are.

I agree with Karen completely, that this is not a personal problem, that this is a societal issue, and certainly many more people

want to work at home and they should be helped to do it. But we’re

battling a lot of assumptions here, too, about if we don’t see them,

how do we know if they’re working and, you know, give them an

inch and they’ll take a mile——

Senator ALEXANDER. Did your research show that more people

would prefer to work at home? I think that is what you said earlier.

Ms. GALINSKY. Very strongly, yes. I think it was 43 percent——

Senator ALEXANDER.—who would prefer to do some work at

home?

Ms. GALINSKY. Would prefer to do——

Senator ALEXANDER. Only 11 percent are doing some work at

home.

Ms. GALINSKY. Of the 89 percent who don’t work at home, there

is two-in-five who would prefer to have regularly scheduled hours.

I’m not talking about bringing work home, which tons and tons of

people do. Increasingly, you know, people carry their office home if

they have that kind of job and carry it back to work the next morning, or do their e-mail and so forth.

Senator ALEXANDER. Well, it doesn’t sound like 11 percent is a

high percent, but, in our workforce in America, that would be, with

129 million people working, that would be a lot of people, 13 or 14

million. What you are saying is 40 or 50 million people would like

to do more of the work they now do outside the home in the home.

Ms. GALINSKY. In the home, particularly parents of teenagers,

who have learned that those after school hours are the times when

kids get in trouble.

It is also, by the way, more than double. The number of people

who work at home full time went from .7 percent to 1.7 percent,

or 2 percent, just in the last 5 years.
20

Senator ALEXANDER. So, that’s a million, million-and-a-half people.

Ms. GALINSKY. Yes.

Senator ALEXANDER. That’s a lot of people.

Ms. GALINSKY. Right. So it has been a big increase.

Ms. KORNBLUH. One thing just to add to that, a topic that is not

before this committee. But, despite the promise of telecommunications and the availability of broadband in large businesses, it is

not as available in small businesses and certainly not to individual

homes, so, one advantage of pushing that technology and making

sure it is available at home would be—in addition to telemedicine

and entertainment—would be the ability to work more easily from

home. It is now still difficult in many places to get affordable

broad-band access.

Senator ALEXANDER. I am very involved in that issue on another

front.

I want to get on to the next panel, but you were very helpful in

your testimony in making some specific suggestions. Of course, we

have lots of things to consider here at the same time we’re in a

global marketplace. All businesses are working hard to keep costs

down, so that jobs will stay here instead of going to China and

Mexico, so all of that comes in.

Plus, we Americans like to work. Our family moved to Australia

after I was Governor in 1987, and because we had been so busy,

my wife felt we should take 6 months off, which we did, which

most families can’t. But, we found in Australia most families do.

They actually have a national law that requires companies, every

10 years, to give employees 6 months off. This goes back to the

time when Australia was founded, and it would take 2 months to

sail back to England, 2 months to visit with the relatives, and 2

months to sail back. That’s a national law.

You suggested some things that don’t cost much, at least in taxpayer dollars, that might make some difference. So, let me ask

each of you this question.

If you were focusing just on the Federal Government—because

this is a societal problem, but the Federal Government is a big part

of society—from your list or from other ideas, if you were a United

States Senator, what would be the first two or three things that

you would suggest we go to work on to help create more flexibility

in the workplace and value more highly the job of being a parent?

Ms. KORNBLUH. I guess where I would start in terms of importance, but not ease, definitely, would be health care, somehow getting over this problem that if you need a flexible job, you put the

ability to get health care——

Senator ALEXANDER. Would disconnecting health care coverage

from the workplace be one way to do that? I know the New American Foundation has some ideas about that.

Ms. KORNBLUH. Yes, certainly. That would be one way. And, then

there are other ideas for how you could provide—you could do it

more incrementally. You could do it through tax incentives or providing the ability to provide group health insurance to workers who

can’t get it through their employers. But, certainly if it was citizenbased, that would be another way to do it. That would require a

wholesale change.
21

Things that are on the easier side to do would be some of these

issues of working with employers to help them get over the hump

and do what they can do in terms of creating these awards, working with companies to provide tax incentives. I know there is a

great deal of discussion about leave policies, so that at least parents, when they really need to be with a sick relative, whether it

is an older parent or a child, would be able to get the time off.

Senator ALEXANDER. I believe you suggested the Malcolm

Baldrige type of award for companies that do the best job of creating a family-friendly workplace. I know many companies who ordered their whole existence around trying to win the Malcolm

Baldrige award, and the goal there was quality. Any more thoughts

about that?

Ms. KORNBLUH. I think during that whole quality—I will let

Ellen answer more fully, but during that whole move toward quality, there was a sense among American businesses at first that it’s

going to cost me money to train my workers and reduce my number

of defects to meet these quality standards. Why would I want to?

It is going to be more costly to the bottom line.

I think some of the leaders in the business schools and in the

most forward-looking companies realized that no, it is going to improve American companies’ competitiveness and bottom line if they

implement these quality standards and spend a little money upstream, and through awards like that, through activities by the

business community and business leaders and the Council on Competitiveness and elsewhere, they spread that gospel and I think it

is now very widely understood. Ellen is starting that work in the

area of flexibility, as has Working Mother magazine.

Ms. GALINSKY. Well, you will hear from Carol Evans on what an

enormous incentive these awards are. I don’t think it is the only

solution, but I do think it is an important solution.

We decided to pilot this notion of awards, particularly focusing

on small and mid-sized companies, because most Americans, as you

know, work in smaller companies. We are going to pilot these in

eight communities, working with an affiliate of the Chamber of

Commerce. We are doing business forums and will be giving

awards. We see that as a platform to taking these awards more national, including small and mid-sized companies in them.

We do a benchmarking study. We do a study of employees, but

we also do a study of employers, called the Business Worklife

Study, and we are going to benchmark these awards to see whether, in fact, they do bring about change.

On the policy side, if I had to start somewhere, I guess I would

start two places. One is really looking at reduced hours, looking at

the wage penalties. In our study, 61 percent of employees that

worked for companies that employed part-timers felt that they

didn’t receive the same kinds of wages on a pro rata basis. That

is, if you worked part-time, you have a lower salary than you would

if you were doing the same exact job full-time. I think that that is

an area of important reform.

We looked in the report that we published in the fall at the gap

between women’s and men’s wages, and there still, of course, is

this glass ceiling and wage gap, as we all know. We were able to

statistically equalize the earnings of men and women by controlling
22

for a few things, like part-time work. There were a number of other

things that made a difference, but working part-time was one of

the major predictors of the wage gap, if you just look at the wage

gap on an hourly sort of basis.

I also think that as the workforce ages—and grandparents are

very important in raising children these days, too, so my definition

of parents would include grandparents. I would really look at the

majority of people who would like reduced hours, but the penalties

that they have with reduced hours, and then ways of providing

health care, whether they are innovative health care pools, the

kind set up for freelancers, or whether it is changing the whole

health care system, so that people who work part-time don’t have

to give up the health care for themselves and their families.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thanks very much to both of you for coming. We look forward to continuing this discussion.

Ms. GALINSKY. We do, too. Thank you.

Senator ALEXANDER. I would invite the second panel now to come

to the table. Thank you very much.

I am going to briefly introduce each of the witnesses, and then,

we will start with Donna Klein and just go right down the table,

if we may do that.

Donna Klein is President and founder of Corporate Voices for

Working Families, a nonprofit coalition of 46 corporations, committed to bipartisan public policy solutions and private sector practices

that strengthen and support working families.

Mr. and Mrs. Martinez, who are here, both work for the Marriott

Corporation. They are going to tell their story of how flexible work

environment helps them as they try to be what modern parents

are, jugglers, with their family responsibilities.

Joy Bunson is Senior Vice President and executive in charge of

leadership and development for JPMorgan Chase. She has global

responsibilities for their work life programs.

Michael Shum is Director of Diversity and Workplace Effectiveness for IBM, with global responsibilities for IBM’s worklife programs, and Carol Evans, who has been mentioned a few times, is

the founder of Working Mother Media, and they publish—showing

a fascination with lists in America. One of the lists we are most

fascinated with is the 100 best companies for working mothers,

which many companies compete for.

So, I thank all of you for coming. You have all got big stories to

tell, but if you could summarize your remarks maybe in five minutes each, then that will leave us more time for questions. We have

a vote that will be coming up after 11:30, some 20 to 12:00, so we

will have to end the hearing by about then.

So, Donna Klein, thank you.
23

STATEMENTS OF DONNA M. KLEIN, PRESIDENT AND CEO CORPORATE VOICES FOR WORKING FAMILIES; ZOILA AND

MANUEL MARTINEZ, EMPLOYEES OF MARRIOTT CORPORATION; JOY BUNSON, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF HUMAN

RESOURCES, JPMORGAN CHASE; MICHAEL SHUM, DIRECTOR OF GLOBAL WORKFORCE DIVERSITY OPERATIONS, IBM;

AND CAROL EVANS, CEO OF WORKING MOTHER MEDIA, AND

EDITOR, WORKING MOTHER MAGAZINE

Ms. KLEIN. Senator Alexander, thank you for the invitation to

appear before you today. I also thank you for your leadership in

bringing the issues of working families before Congress.

Corporate Voices is a nonpartisan, nonprofit partnership organization, created to bring that private sector voice into the public dialogue and to improve corporate practices with respect to working

families.

Since we began in 2001, we have grown to 47 company partners, 47 members, representing 4 million employees and $800 billion in

revenues, and 75 percent of our companies are from the Fortune

500, and our members have operations in all 50 States.

Corporate Voices member corporations are leaders in the workfamily field. Twenty-one of these are on the Working Mother List

that we talked about already this morning. Many are also recognized as Fortune Magazine’s best places to work, as well as Fortune’s most admired companies.

But no matter how much they endeavor to meet the needs of

their employees, they cannot accomplish it alone. Although our

partner companies employ 4 million, this is a small percentage of

the 137 million private sector American workers—actually, it is

less than 3 percent—69 million of the 137 million work for medium

and small size enterprises, those companies with less than 500 employees. The reality today is that only some workers in some companies and in some places have the support services they need to

be both strong productive employees and caring parents.

Unless communities provide for both pre-school and after-school

programs, there is no place for the children of employees to go.

Without programs to help seniors continue to be as independent as

possible within their own communities, employees cannot meet

their obligations to their elderly relatives.

Moreover, the lack of flexibility in work schedules holds employees to rigid patterns of work that do not reflect the variabilities

and the in-the-moment problem solving required by today’s work

and family realities.

Finally, we must make family support for low-wage workers

more accessible by revising the application processes for advance

EITC. It would be a simple solution, but it would help workers and

their families avoid the potential financial crisis that one small

mishap in their life creates. Some scheduling flexibility would

mean a worker with a sick child would not have to feel threatened

with the loss of a job. It would mean an entire household may not

plunge into financial crisis when a car breakdown causes unavoidable absences from work and potential job loss.

These realities have led to the work of Corporate Voices. We

focus on four essential pillars that working families need and often

do not have: early care and education for young children, as well
24

as after school for older children; flexibility in the scheduling of

work; supportive elder care policies and programs; and family economic security.

Today this committee will hear from two of our corporate partners, providing detailed testimony on both elder care and the education and care of young children, and Corporate Voices is pleased

to endorse their testimony.

In each focus area, Corporate Voices is working to make the business case for private investment as well as public investment, to

make it clear and visible. Working with our members and a wide

circle of strategic partners, we disseminate and share what we

learned about the potential return on these investments as core

business practices. We share that learning with policymakrs, advocates, and the media. Our emphasis is on making the business case

that improving the ability of employees to balance their work and

family obligations is essential to improving employee and customer

satisfaction, decreasing the costs of absenteeism and turnover, increasing retention and improving customer satisfaction—all of

which are factors in increased productivity and shareholder value.

Recent research shows these are strong correlations. However,

this research has not yet influenced the work culture in most corporations. Worse, business and government support for programs

and policies that working families must have lags behind the increasing prevalence of the these dual-earning families in the workforce.

Additionally, despite valid research supported by considerable

survey and anecdotal evidence, the conventional wisdom of the

stock market has essentially dismissed the fact that employee satisfaction is a key determinant to a healthy bottom line. With few

exceptions, Wall Street generally rewards the firms that take the

hard line—laying off employees and decreasing benefits to meet

quarterly profit targets, and labels those who do not do so as ‘‘soft.’’

Recently—in fact, in March of 2004—in the article, ‘‘Costco’s Dilemma: Be Kind to Its Workers, or Wall Street?’’ the Wall Street

Journal contrasted a gigantic retailer to Costco, tying Costco’s relatively low stock price to Wall Street’s perception of its overgenerous benefits package.

Corporate Voices is working with a number of groups to develop

a sound business case that can help to change the culture of the

workplace and the reactions of Wall Street. For example, last May,

Corporate Voices and the Business Roundtable released key principles of early education, ‘‘A Call to Action from the Business Community.’’ It articulates consensus among 195 companies on the

need for quality care for three- and four-year-olds, and increasing

an expanding roll for all stakeholders, both public and private.

In the few minutes remaining, I would like to focus on just a couple of points. First, Corporate Voices and our partner corporations

can be a resource to this committee as it begins to craft policy solutions by making available the innovative practices and the research

of our companies. Today, we are releasing the report ‘‘Increasing

the Visibility of the Invisible Workforce: Model Programs and Practices for Hourly and Lower Wage Employees.’’ By participating in

this study, the 15 companies that are profiled are demonstrating
25

their commitment to educating policymakers and the greater business community about the wisdom of such supports.

Second, we would like to share our suggestions on four ways that

the Congress can provide leadership resulting in policies supportive

to working families.

First, simplify and promote the Earned Income Tax Credit and

Advance Earned Income Tax Credit to increase family economic

stability. For a minimum up front investment, employers can promote family economic security among low wage employees. This

year, Corporate Voices released an EITC tool kit that was produced

by employers for employer outreach. It educates employers on the

pitfalls of for-profit tax preparation, motivates employees to use the

IRS free tax preparation sites, and encourages employers to promote Advanced EITC.

Second, we urge support for high quality pre-school for three and

4 year olds, and after-school programs for school-aged children. As

reflected in our statement of principles on high-quality early childhood education, such programs directly correlate into success in the

K–12 system.

Third, we urge the creation of a meaningful public dialogue over

the laws that govern workers’ flexibility. The workplace of today

has evolved significantly, yet the laws governing workplace schedules have remained stagnant. Improvements are desperately needed that will allow increased flexibility for working families. We also

encourage the inclusion of all stakeholders in this conversation—

business, labor, families, and policymakers.

We also urge the creation of a national commission on elder care.

You will hear shortly testimony from IBM that the elder care problem is increasing rapidly and it will only intensify along with its

cost to business. It is a national problem and deserves national attention.

Corporate Voices feels that now is the time for elevating the deliberation on public policies to support the working families that

keep America productive and strong. Neither working families nor

the companies they work for can carry the full load. Government

must become a partner if we are to reach the scale necessary to

provide the services families need. They need them to be both productive employees and caring family members.

I would like to introduce you to the Martinez family, who will

talk about their challenges and how they work to overcome them

on a daily basis. Mr. and Mrs. Martinez hold down the equivalent

of almost three full-time jobs between them. They did not qualify

for EITC in 2003. With nearly three full-time jobs, they were marginally over the eligibility threshold. This couple, and so many like

them, work day in and day out to honor their commitments to their

employer, Marriott, and to each other and to their children.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Klein follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DONNA M. KLEIN

Senator Alexander, Senator Dodd and Members of the Committee, thank you for

the invitation to appear before you today. We welcome this hearing and the leadership of you, Mr. Chairman, and this subcommittee in bringing the issues of working

families before the Congress. I am Donna Klein, President/CEO of Corporate Voices
26

for Working Families, and most recently, Vice President of Workforce Effectiveness

at Marriott.

Corporate Voices (www.cvworkingfamilies.org) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit partnership organization created to bring the private sector voice into the public dialogue

and to improve corporate practice on issues affecting working families. Since we

began in 2001, we have grown to 47 member corporations with 4 million employees

and $800 billion in revenues, 75 percent of whom are Fortune 500 companies. Our

members have operations in all 50 States.

Corporate Voices member corporations are leaders in the work-family field: 21 are

on the Working Mother list of 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers. But no matter how much they endeavor to meet the needs of their employees, they cannot accomplish it alone. Although our partner companies employ 4 million employees, that

is a small percentage of the 137 million private-sector American workers (actually

.029 percent); 69 million of whom work in small- or medium-size enterprises. The

reality today is that only some workers in some companies in some places have the

support systems they need in place to be strong productive employees and caring

parents.

Unless communities provide for both pre-school and after-school programs, there

is no place for the children of employees to go. Without programs to help seniors

continue to be as independent as possible in the community, employees cannot meet

their obligations to their elderly relatives.

Moreover, the lack of flexibility in addressing commuting needs in scheduling

work and meetings holds employees to rigid schedules that do not reflect the differences in today’s work and family realities. Finally, we must make family support

for low-wage workers more accessible by revising the application for Advance EITC

so that workers and their families no longer live one small mishap away from financial crises others might be able to shrug off more easily. Worker sick leave underwritten by some schedule flexibility means a sick child will not threaten the loss

of a job or that an entire household can be plunged into financial crises when a car

breakdown causes unavoidable absences from work.

These realities have led to the work of Corporate Voices. We focus on the four

essential pillars that working families need and often do not have: early care and

education for young children as well as after-school for older children; flexibility in

the scheduling of work; supportive elder care; and family economic security. Today

this committee will hear from two of our corporate partners providing detailed testimony on both elder care and the education and care of young children. We are

pleased to endorse their testimony.

In each focus area Corporate Voices is working to make the business case for private investment and public dollars clear and visible. Working with our members and

a wide circle of strategic partners, we widely disseminate and share what we

learned about the potential return on these investments as core business practices

with policymakers, advocates and the media. Our emphasis is on making the business case that improving the ability of employees to balance their work and family

concerns is essential to improving employee satisfaction, decreasing the costs of absenteeism and turnover, increasing retention and improving customer satisfaction—

all factors in increased productivity and shareholder value.

Recent research shows that employee satisfaction is directly related to increased

productivity, customer satisfaction and shareholder value. However, such research

has not yet influenced the work culture in many corporations. Worse, business and

government support for programs and policies that working families must have has

lagged behind the increasing prevalence of the workforce.

Additionally, despite valid research supported by considerable survey and anecdotal evidence, the conventional wisdom of the stock market has essentially dismissed the fact that employee satisfaction is a key determinant of a healthy bottom

line. With the exception of selective mutual funds focused on socially responsible investing, Wall Street generally rewards the firms that take the ‘‘hard line’’—laying

off employees and decreasing benefits to meet quarterly targets and labels those

who do not as ‘‘soft.’’ Recently, (March 26, 2004) in the article, ‘‘Costco’s Dilemma:

Be Kind to Its Workers, or Wall Street?’’ the Wall Street Journal contrasted WalMart and Costco, tying Costco’s relatively low stock price to Wall Street’s perception

of its over-generous benefits package.

Corporate Voices is working with a number of groups to develop a sound business

case that can help to change the culture of the workplace and the reactions of Wall

Street. For example, Corporate Voices and the Business Roundtable developed ‘‘A

Call to Action from the Business Community: Why America Needs High-Quality

Early Childhood Education.’’ In addition, we are consolidating proprietary data from

our member companies and surveying their practices and experience to make a

more compelling case for private and public investment in the workers of America.
27

In the few minutes remaining I would like to focus on two points: First, Corporate

Voices and our partner corporations can be a resource to this committee as it crafts

policy solutions by making available the innovative practices of our member companies. Today we are releasing the report ‘‘Increasing the Visibility of the Invisible

Workforce: Model Programs and Practices for Hourly and Lower Wage Employees.’’

This pertinent report was authored by Dr. Leon Litchfield of Boston College. By participating in this report, the companies profiled are demonstrating their commitment and educating policymakers along with the greater business community contemplating workplace supports.

Second, we would like to share our thoughts on four ways that the Congress can

provide leadership resulting in policies supportive to working families. We would be

happy to provide the committee with additional information on these recommendations:

l. Simplify and promote the Earned Income Tax Credit and Advance EITC to increase family economic security. For a minimum upfront investment, employers can

promote family economic security among low wage employees. This year Corporate

Voices released an EITC Tool Kit that was produced by employers, for employer outreach. It educates employers on the pitfalls of for-profit tax preparation; motivates

employees to use IRS free tax preparation sites; and encourages employers to promote Advance EITC enrollment.

2. Support high-quality pre-school for 3- and 4-year-olds and after-school programs for school-aged children. As reflected in our statement of principles on highquality early childhood education, high-quality early childhood education programs

are important to families and business. High-quality preschool and after-school programs can make a difference in social and academic school readiness.

3. Create a meaningful public dialogue over the labor laws that govern workers

schedules. The workplace of today has evolved significantly, yet the laws governing

workplace schedules have remained stagnant. Improvements are desperately needed

that will allow increased flexibility for working families. We encourage the inclusion

of all stakeholders in this conversation: business, labor, families and policymakers.

4. Create a National Commission on Elder Care. As you will hear in testimony

by Mike Shum of IBM, the elder care problem is increasing rapidly and it will only

intensify. Further, it is a major cost factor for business. Individuals are struggling

with providing the care that their elderly or disabled family members need—often

from a great distance and at a cost to their productivity and career opportunities.

All too often public discussions have focused solely on the elderly or disabled citizen

without giving attention to the caregiver and the economic and business impact of

the difficulty of providing such care while being a productive employee. It is a national problem and deserves national attention from all involved.

Mr. Chairman, Corporate Voices feels that now is the time for deliberation of public policies to support working families in their commitment to keep America’s productivity strong. Neither working families nor the companies they work for can

carry the full load; government must become a partner if we are to reach the scale

necessary to provide the services working families must have to be both productive

employees and caring family members.

Finally, I would like to introduce you to the Martinez family who will talk about

their challenges and how they work to overcome them on a daily basis. Because Mr.

and Mrs. Martinez hold down the equivalent of almost three full-time jobs between

them, they are now over the eligibility threshold for the EITC. They have two young

children ages 7 and 8 at home and have not been able to afford the quality child

care they would like their children to receive. This couple, and so many like them,

work day-in-and-out to honor their commitments to their employers, each other, and

their children who will 1 day be employees themselves. I believe you will find their

story to be a compelling one. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator ALEXANDER. Mr. and Mrs. Martinez, welcome.

Mrs. ZOILA MARTINEZ. We are here to talk about our day care.

We have three kids. One is 21 years old, who is in college, and we

have two boys, who are 7 and 8. When they were younger, we were

looking for day care for them, what we were looking for was so expensive that we cannot afford to put them in day care and we have

to look for something cheaper that we can afford to pay.

We paid $88 for both of them each week, and really, the day care

they attended didn’t make me happy to have them there, because

there weren’t enough quality teachers who can take care of them

very well.
28

When I came and picked them up from the school, they were wet,

dirty, and nobody was paying attention to them. Really, I was feeling so bad. I guess you, too, when you see little kids wet and dirty,

you will feel the same way, the way I was feeling, you know.

It is really hard to be working, both of us, at the same time.

Where we’re working at now, we have a facility that I can request

days off and my husband can pick them up at the school. Now,

they are in the school in second and first grade. I can request my

days off to put them at the public school, 2 days when I’m off at

work on Thursday and Friday, and my husband can do it on Tuesday and Wednesday. But still, the public school does not have

enough teachers to take care when they are out playing or when

they go for activities.

Sometimes they come in after school and we need more people

who can take care of them there at the school. We don’t have that.

We have to rush from work to pick them up from school. Sometimes, we have to rush them to try to catch the bus, and sometimes

the bus passes by. It is frustrating, you know.

Senator ALEXANDER. Mr. Martinez, would you like to add something to that?

Mr. MANUEL MARTINEZ. Yes. Good morning, Senator Alexander.

I would like to add something else.

One of the worst situations is in the summertime after school.

We have the problem of who’s going to take care of them. One of

those problems is when they have a half-day, for example at 12:00

o’clock, and we get off from work at 3:00 o’clock. That’s one of the

things that make us have to call for someone to take care of them

and we have to pay extra money for that.

We would like to have something where——

Ms. KLEIN. Manuel, would you like to tell Senator Alexander exactly how much you have to pay to have someone walk your children to school or for that half-day of care?

Mr. MANUEL MARTINEZ. Yes. Most of the time we pay like about

$30 for the half day——

Mrs. ZOILA MARTINEZ. Just to walk the kids to school.

Mr. MANUEL MARTINEZ. Yes, to the school. Of course, they don’t

say we have to pay this, but we have to because, who knows, the

next day we may see the same situation, or like almost any day.

I work like at two places, and it is very hard for us to take care

of them.

Mrs. ZOILA MARTINEZ. Sometimes, we have to sacrifice our

daughter. She is in college, you know, and sometimes we have to

tell her that today, you know, we can’t take the kids to the school

and you are going to do it, or before the year she started her college, she had to make a schedule and she is asking us, okay, mom,

these are the days I can take the kids to the school. I say, okay,

which is sometimes Mondays or sometimes Friday, but most of the

time when I’m over there working at the Marriott company, I’m off

Thursday and Fridays. Sometimes my mother, too, or my daughter

has to do something, and we cannot depend on them. We’re the

ones who have to take care of them. I cannot sacrifice my daughter

because of my kids or my mother because of that. My mother is a

working person, too. She works and cannot stay home.
29

But, if I can have my mother home, of course, I have her stay

with the kids or take the kids to the school. But unfortunately, we

can’t do that.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you very much for your coming here

and for telling your story. That’s a great help.

[The prepared statement of Mr. and Mrs. Martinez follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF ZOILA AND MANUEL MARTINEZ

My name is Zoila Martinez and this is my husband, Manuel Martinez: We live

in Washington, DC., and own our own home.

We have three children, a daughter, 21, and two sons, 8 and 7. I am a lobby attendant now and have been with Marriott Metro Center’s Housekeeping Department for 15 years. I have also worked in hospitality since I came to this country

from Guatemala 19 years ago. I am now a U.S. citizen. I try to help my mother,

who has diabetes, with doctor’s appointments and anything that requires translation from Spanish to English. My mother still works and lives independently, but

I do help her many times a week.

My husband, Manuel, who is originally from El Salvador, has been a member of

the bell staff at the Marriott Metro Center for 3 years. Prior to that, he worked with

the valet staff at the hotel for a number of years. He works full-time, 5 days at the

Marriott and an average of four shifts per week at a Sheraton Hotel as a driver.

Company Support

In 2003, we did not qualify for EITC. We needed to use some of the community

services that are offered from time-to-time. For instance, an agency helped us in

Spanish with the paperwork, application and to understand the financial process to

buy our home.

The greatest support Marriott offers us is flexibility. For example, I was promoted

from housekeeper to lobby attendant. This means I can work from 6 a.m. to 2:30

p.m. I wanted this position so I could be at home for my boys when they leave school

because we could not afford an after school program.

My husband and I now work at the same hotel. Manuel’s schedule allows him to

walk the boys to school and I can meet them when school is over. We both use public transportation to get to work and take the boys to and from school. It gets very

stressful when the buses run late or we miss the regular bus we are used to taking.

It means Manuel or I could be late for work or worse, I would be late in picking

my sons up at school. I worry a lot about getting our sons at school and taking them

home. I do not like for them to have to wait for me alone, without an adult. Too

many bad things could happen.

I change my work schedule when school is closed for a half or full day. I try to

coordinate with my mother, my older daughter or a friend to watch the boys for me.

If I cannot make other arrangements, I will have to miss work. However, Marriott

supports me and Manuel, and they do not make us feel bad about needing to be

home to care of our children.

Along with our schedule flexibility, both Manuel and I appreciate the medical benefits: health and dental, short and long-term disability, and life insurance, that we

have with Marriott. We also participate in profit sharing and have credit union accounts. All these things are very important to us and our family.

We used the credit union to get a loan for a used car. We do not use the car for

work because it is too expensive to park.

When our boys were younger, I looked for quality daycare locations for them. But

we could not afford the tuition ($170–$200 per week). I finally put them in a community daycare at a Christian center and we paid $88 per week total for the two

of them. I really felt bad about them being there because I wish we could have put

them in a better place. Sometimes when I picked them up they were wet or had

dirty diapers, and the child care giver did not seem to care. It made me feel sad

to leave them and they said they did not like it there. As the boys became older

they would complain and tell me that other children pushed them around and hit

them. Clearly, adult supervision was not good enough.

Our sons are both school age now. Our biggest challenges are overseeing the quality of their schooling and arranging for care when school is closed. The teacher to

student ratio at school is not good and what is offered for after school and summer

are of too low a quality for what we can afford to pay.

During the summer, we have more problems because the only program we can

afford is at a school for half-a-day. I am always trying to work with my husband’s

days off, my mother’s schedule, and my daughter and friends. Sometimes we need
30

to pay someone $25 to walk their kids to school. Or we may need to pay someone

about $30 for half-a-day. It all depends on who is doing what and how much money

they need.

Another challenge we often face is when our hours are cut. Then it is very hard

for us to make ends meet. The years 2001 and 2002 were very hard but our hours

are back to normal now. At another time, we both had our hours cut. We each went

to our managers to talk to them and the hotel was able to increase both our hours

enough so that we could make ends meet.

We do not feel like we need to sacrifice our most basic life needs for our family

because of our insurance coverage. When times are tight with money, we do not go

on our annual vacation to see our families in Guatemala and El Salvador. We cannot imagine retiring right now because we do not have the money. We are working

on our profit sharing to help us when the time comes. We do not buy Marriott stock

because we do not have extra money to do that. Our daughter is paying for her own

education at the University of Maryland with some help from her employer (the government). She works full-time to pay for college and we are very proud of her.

Thank you for allowing us to testify today.

Senator ALEXANDER. In a moment, we will hear from the other

witnesses, but first I have a statement here from Senator Chris

Dodd, who may not be able to come today, but who is the ranking

Democratic member of the committee and has been a strong leader

on these issues for a long, long time. We work together on the

issues.

I would like to submit for the record his statement.

[The prepared statement of Senator Dodd follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR DODD

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for holding this hearing

today about balancing work and family. This is a critical issue for

millions of Americans, particularly the impact on children, as parents struggle to do their best at work and at home.

I commend your efforts, Mr. Chairman, to highlight the importance of this issue and I look forward to working with you in the

months ahead to further examine how we can build more effective

partnerships to help parents raise their children.

I also want to thank today’s witnesses for the dedication and devotion to better workplace practices to enable parents to succeed in

their jobs and also to have quality time for their children.

I have long been interested in improving the work-family balancing act that so many parents juggle on a daily basis. Particularly as a parent of a young child, I know first-hand how hard it

is to balance a demanding job while still feeling as if I have enough

quality time with my daughter.

It was over 20 years ago that I first introduced the Family and

Medical Leave Act. Finally signed into law in 1993, more than 35

million Americans have taken family and medical leave. I have also

introduced legislation to provide States with funds to create paid

leave policies so that those who cannot afford to take leave under

the Family and Medical Leave Act, since it’s unpaid leave, can do

so.

Despite the many Americans the Family and Medical Leave Act

has helped, too many continue to be left behind. Too many continue

to have to choose between job and family. The facts are clear: while

family and medical leave is one aspect of workplace flexibility, access to flextime, access to sick leave and vacation leave, as well as

paid leave are also important in promoting a healthier balance between work and family.
31

Times have changed over the years. More and more mothers are

working. While only 27 percent of mothers with infants were in the

labor force in 1960, by 2001 that percentage rose to nearly 55 percent. Employees are working longer hours today. Men now work

nearly 50 hours per week on average while women average over 40

hours. With increased access to technology such as computers, cell

phones, pagers, and blackberries, the line between work and home

can often be a blur.

It is no wonder that 67 percent of employed parents say they

don’t have enough time with their children.

I know we will hear today about encouraging practices and

trends to encourage or promote a better balance for parents raising

children, and also, for parents caring for elderly parents—a growing phenomenon that my generation faces.

Other major industrialized nations have implemented policies

that do an outstanding job of promoting early childhood development and family caregiving. At least 128 countries, including not

only industrialized nations but developing nations—from Algeria to

Zimbabwe—provide paid and job-protected maternity leave, with 16

weeks the average basic paid leave.

Compared to these nations, the United States is far behind in efforts to promote the wellbeing of our families.

This hearing today is only one of a series of hearings we will

have about raising children and balancing work and family. I am

hopeful that we will be able to work in a bipartisan manner to

draft legislation to promote greater access to paid sick leave, paid

family and medical leave, and also greater incentives for employers

to offer more flexible work schedules.

When we talk about a more compassionate America, nowhere is

that more evident than in our caregiving leave policies. No one

should have to choose between work and family. Women and men

deserve to take leave when family or health conditions require it

without fear of losing their job or livelihood. Parents need to be

able to work and have quality time for their children—not just

when their children are sick, but also to become involved in their

children’s lives.

We must not simply pay lip service to the goals of family unity

and of a healthy workplace. Instead, we must actively work to

make these goals a reality for every American Family. In my view,

it is simply impossible to proclaim a belief in ‘‘family values’’ if our

laws do not value families.

I look forward to today’s testimony. And, again, I want to commend the chairman for his interest in this area and for holding this

hearing today.

Senator ALEXANDER. We are delighted to have Senator Clinton

with us today. I wonder if you would like to make some comments,

Hillary.

Senator CLINTON. I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing. I apologize that I couldn’t get here in time for the

first panel, but I want to have a chance to hear this panel. I know

how important these issues are, and I especially appreciate the

leadership of many in the business community who recognize the

tough implications of making sure that there is some kind of structure to support working families.
32

I particularly want to thank Mr. and Mrs. Martinez for being

here to share their story.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you, Senator Clinton.

Ms. Bunson is next, and then we will go to Mr. Shum and to

Carol Evans.

Ms. BUNSON. Good morning. First, I would like to thank you for

giving JPMorgan Chase and myself the opportunity to talk about

this critical issue of early childhood education.

I think that I could not demonstrate in any better way than the

story that Mr. and Mrs. Martinez just told, on how crucially important it is to people who work in the United States to be able to be

productive and effective at their jobs and still be valued as parents.

In the interest of summarizing my remarks, I think you know

about all of the research that demonstrates that high-quality early

childhood education matters, that it gives children an advantage in

starting kindergarten that without some may never actually be

able to recover in terms of lost wages, in terms of their ability to

stay in school, in terms of their ability to really contribute to their

full potential in society.

So we at JPMorgan Chase, having heard from many employees

with stories, perhaps a little bit like the Martinez family, decided

to invest in early childhood education for our staff. What we

thought would make the most sense was to really go out and ask

people.

Our strategy and our story really begins as far back as 1990,

when we happened to be moving lots of people from Wall Street to

a facility in downtown Brooklyn. We thought we would take a step

back and say to people, gee, you know what? What’s going to actually make this a great place for you to work, because we would

really like you to come with us.

A little bit to our surprise, the issues that surfaced were really

around balancing their work and their home lives. I think then we

called it work and family in 1990. They said to us, you know what?

We really need some help here. This is not something that companies have talked about in the past. We would really like you to

make some investment. So, we ask them what. Gee, what kind of

investments would make the most sense for you?

Again, to our surprise, by asking people, what they said was, you

know, as hard as it is—and I think you heard this—we can get to

work every day because we have child care. But you know what?

When our child care system breaks down in some way, we have no

options. There are no options in our communities. We have to take

three or four or five subway stops away from our workplace to drop

our child off at our mother, so that she can watch them for three

hours, and then have to worry that, when she has to go to her job,

they get appropriately dropped off with somebody else.

So, if you are going to make any investment in child care for us,

please make it in providing us with options around back-up care,

and please provide us with options around summer care. In fact,

that’s where we need help the most.

What they also told us is that, on average, they miss 3 days a

year of unscheduled work time because of child care breakdowns.

So, from every perspective, from an employee perspective, which is

what you just heard today, and from an employer perspective,
33

where it is important for us to have people coming to work, making

this investment in early childhood education really made sense for

us.

So, in 1992, we opened our first back-up child care center at the

Metrotech facility, which is in downtown Brooklyn, NY. Today, we

have 16 back-up child care centers in communities around the

United States. We offer up to 20 days of free back-up child care to

our employees, in addition to what we kind of call kind of transition care. So, we offer 8 weeks of full-time care to employees who

are training to work after either having or adopting a baby—we

call it the ‘‘8 week advantage’’.

We offer employees 8 weeks of full-time child care if they are relocating from one of our facilities to another and they’re in that

critical transition time when they’re trying to find other help. We

have extended time for employees whose partners or spouses are

serving in Iraq. So, we really try to use our back-up child care centers as a way to support all of the needs that full-time care, as reliable as it is sometimes, can’t provide for people.

But, no way can I sit here and say to you that we have provided

for all of our employees’ diverse needs in terms of child care. We

were very specific in terms of focusing on back-up care. With that,

we are also specific about investing in the communities in which

our employees live and work, in terms of increasing the quality and

supply of child care, both through our foundation and both through

supporting the development and the building of new child care centers, through the work within our child care centers of programs

like the CDA accreditation, which we offer to community workers,

and through a series of efforts that we’ve done in homeless shelters

and in battered women shelters in communities all over the United

States, where we have helped to provide safe places that are appropriate for children of all ages.

So for us, what we are trying to do is couple a strategy around

back-up care with a strategy around increasing the supply and

quality of child care in communities.

But, we know we can’t do it by ourselves. One of the reasons we

were so pleased to be here is to give us a chance to say that one

of the gaps that our employees have in almost every community is

the ability to find affordable quality child care. To the extent that

there is something the Federal Government can do to enable people

like the Martinez family, people like our own employees, to have

better access to quality—and I will talk about quality for a minute,

because for us, quality has been a cornerstone of all of our child

care efforts.

Ten of our back-up child care centers are nationally accredited,

and the other six are in the process of getting accredited. I think

you know only six percent of child care centers nationwide receive

national accreditation, and as we give our employees the opportunity to participate in child care in our centers, we also give them

an opportunity to learn about what quality child care is.

But, I will say that that’s a little bit of a mixed blessing, because,

in fact, the quality they see in our centers is often not found in the

communities in which they live and work. To the extent that,

again, as you look to find opportunities to make a difference in the

world of working families, we think that making a difference in
34

terms of providing more and better child care that is affordable to

all would make a huge difference in the lives of people who work

in this country.

Thank you.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you, Ms. Bunson.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Bunson follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JOY BUNSON

Good morning. I’m Joy Bunson, senior vice president of Human Resources at

JPMorgan Chase, and I’m pleased to be here this morning to talk to you about the

important issue of early childhood education. I’ll share with you some of things

we’re doing at JPMorgan Chase for our own employees—but also some of the studies

we’ve participated in and some of the investments we’re making to improve the

quality of child care and early childhood education across the U.S. As you’ll hear

we’re committed to doing this for very selfish reasons: we believe it gives us a tremendous leg up on attracting and retaining the best employees and, as I’ll talk

about, we have the employee feedback and survey data to back that up. But we also

do it because, frankly, it’s the right thing to do. Studies have shown that high-quality early childhood education makes a difference in terms of children’s school performance, the chance they’ll stay in school, and their lifelong earnings potential. It’s

simply an issue too important to ignore.

First, studies show that the U.S. needs high quality early childhood education. A

study sponsored by The Business Roundtable, an association of 150 CEOs across the

U.S. and Corporate Voices for Working Families, found that by the time children

enter kindergarten, there’s already a wide gap in their readiness for school—and

that those at risk continue to fall further and further behind.

Children of families of lower socio-economic status enter school with much poorer

skills in the major areas of development and learning—there can be up to a 60 percent difference in achievement scores between those from at risk groups and those

in the highest socio-economic group.

There are significant differences in average vocabularies—how quickly students

gain letter recognition, counting, reading and math skills. And these children remain further behind children with fewer at-risk skills. The positive news is that

children—from both low and high socio-economic status families—who attend high

quality early childhood education programs score higher on measures of skills and

abilities that are important for school success. Cost-benefit analysis of several programs have found a cost savings of $7 for every dollar invested—supporting the notion that early education can be a good investment.

So not only does high quality early education make a difference for children, it

clearly matters to their employed parents. For employers like JPMorgan Chase, it’s

therefore a doubly pressing matter. We want to be responsive and supportive to the

needs of our employees today—and, indeed, believe such programs allows us to attract and retain top talent—but a commitment to quality early childhood education

also helps us ensure the quality of our future workforce.

At JPMorgan Chase we’re an organization of 95,600 employees in 1,076 offices

around the world. (And we’re slated to nearly double the size of our employee base

with the impending merger with Bank One.) Here in the U.S. 60 percent of our

workforce are women, with child care and good education being a chief concern.

Several years back we conducted a survey with employees in order to formulate

our child care and work-life policies. In that survey, our employees told us that their

number one issue was finding quality back-up care, closely followed by having

enough time to participate in their children’s activities. Our findings told us that,

on average, employees lost 3 days a year of unscheduled time due to child care

breakdowns—and, studies done by other companies have shown that, in a heavily

female workforce, 6 days a year of unscheduled time due to child care breakdowns

is the norm.

So, in looking at what’s important to our employees—and our goal of attracting

top talent both now and in the future—this need to quality back-up child care has

driven a series of strategic choices for us at JPMorgan Chase. In a nutshell, our

strategy is to implement those programs that allow our employees to contribute

their best and be successful both at work and at home. There are four cornerstones

of our strategy—four criteria, if you will—that all programs must meet. First, they

have to be leadership-level quality (I’ll talk more about that in a minute when I explain our child care programs, but it specifically means accreditation-level quality).

Second, the solutions need to be inclusive of all life events, from employees who

have just become new parents to those facing elder care issues. Third, employees
35

across the country and at all levels need to be able to access them. These are not

programs just for our head office or just for our senior leaders. And fourth, we need

to be able to measure the effectiveness of the program. If we can’t define the impact

to our employees, their families and how we do business, we don’t do it.

So let me explain how this has translated into our strategy for early child care

education, i.e. child care. I mentioned that employees told us their number one concern was emergency back-up child care. At the same time, offering back-up care offers us the opportunity to support greater numbers of employees (as full-time care

typically services the same number of enrolled children.)

In worksites across the U.S. with 1,000 or more employees, we’ve built on-site or

near site back-child care centers. Our first back-up child care center was built in

1992 in Brooklyn, New York. Fourteen years later we have a total of 16 on-site centers, with well over 20,000 families enrolled. We have a tremendous focus on quality, with 10 of our centers receiving national accreditation and all other centers

working toward their accreditation. Nationwide, only 6 percent of centers across the

U.S. are accredited, but we felt it important to set a quality standard for our employees’ children whereby every single center would work toward that goal.

Employees can use our centers at absolutely no cost for up to 20 days per year

per child. It’s important to note that our program is so much more than 8 to 10

hours of free child care for a child. Let me give you a flavor for the kinds of programs our centers offer that have such an impact on our JPMorgan Chase children:

• All our centers offer monthly Lunch-N-Learns and Parent Education Workshops, where parents can discuss parenting skills and education topics.

• We’ve sponsored Child Safety Seat Check days in our centers.

• Our Growing Readers program sends age-appropriate reading lists and fun activities for parents to do at home.

• Our Parent Resource Libraries offer books and resources that can be loaned out

or used in the center.

• We sponsor special events in the centers—like family story night, holiday fairs

and luaus, ‘‘books for breakfast’’ sessions—simply events that get parents involved

in their children’s development and to have some fun along the way.

• Teenagers of JPMC employees can attend babysitting classes.

• Nurses make home visits to those parents participating in our Eight Week Advantage Program, a unique program whereby our employees are provided 8 weeks

of free child care in our centers as they transition back to work after the birth of

a child.

• And in recognition of our effort to improve child care in our communities, we

offer seminars and workshops for caregivers of JPIVIC children. These can include

topics like health and safety, music, reading, and so on.

Would we like to offer full-time quality care to all employee children? Absolutely.

Is it a reasonable offering to thousands of employees spread across the country? No.

So our back-up child care strategy offers us the opportunity to reach out to many

employees—and as they experience the quality of the back-up child care provided

in our centers, they raise the benchmark in their minds of what an early childhood

education experience should be—and strive to duplicate that level when making

their full-time child care arrangements. The impact to JPMorgan Chase of these

programs has been tremendous. I’ve mentioned that we had the children of over

20,000 employees enrolled in our centers—meaning thousands of parents who have

experienced the very best in education and child care arrangements. When we’ve

surveyed employees about the centers’ impact, they’ve told us that having offering

quality child care leads to increased ability to concentrate on the job, improved morale, increased productivity, better attendance, and a huge boost in their commitment to JPMorgan Chase. In fact our most recent employee survey done last fall

noted that there’s up to a 40 percent difference in satisfaction, commitment and productivity scores between those employees who say their managers support their

work-life balance, and those who say their managers are less than supportive. We

work hard to work with those areas with lower scores because we see the bottom

line impact of having committed, satisfied, productive employees. Let me give you

just two quick examples of how our quality programs are impacting JPMorgan

Chase families.

• In our center in San Antonio, Texas, the director of our child care center noticed

that a child was coming into the center on several consecutive days and, in talking

with the child’s mother, found out that the child’s babysitter had quit on short notice and that the child’s father had just been deployed to Iraq. The center suggested

the idea of providing 20 extra days—on top of the 20 already received by employees—for any child whose parent was being called up for military duty—and thus

was born our ‘‘Patriotic Advantage’’ child care program. We were able to help em-
36

ployees already under a great deal of stress and provide some safe, quality care in

the process.

• Another center was able to accommodate a family whose 18-month old child was

born with fluid on the brain. Teachers were able to spend time—in the short time

the child was at the center—working on the toddler’s developmental skills. By the

time she left the center, she was able to communicate with a few words which she

previously did not have the capability to do. Additionally, our center was able to

provide information to help the family research quality full-time child care arrangements.

And again, that’s the point. Our aim is to let parents experience quality child care

and education—and guide them to finding similar experiences in their communities

and families.

In addition to helping our employees, JPMorgan Chase is committed to investing

in quality child care and early education in the communities where we do business.

• In several of our centers we’ve sponsored, in partnership with Bright Horizons

who runs our back-up child care centers, a Child Development Associate Program

for teachers in the community to earn a formal child care credential.

• Another joint program between JPMorgan Chase and Bright Horizons is the

Bright Spaces program, which adopts local homeless shelters to provide fullyequipped play areas.

• The JPMorgan Chase Child Care Grant Program was launched in 2000 in support of Welfare-to-Work initiatives and the need for safe and affordable child care

options for needy families as parents look for jobs. So far, the program has provided

21 organizations over $1.4 million and recoverable grants of $1.1 million to 5 organizations.

• In New York City, we participated in the New York Child Care Seed Fund,

which has a goal of creating 900 quality child care spaces.

I’ve been talking about back-up and full-time quality educational options. After

school is a huge issue as well. JPMorgan Chase recently participated in a study

with Brandeis University’s Community, Families & Work Program and the Alfred

S. Sloan Foundation that found that parents with after-school stress are more than

three times as likely to report high levels of job disruptions and more than four and

a half times as likely to report low levels of psychological wellbeing than parents

with lower levels of after school stress. In terms of employers the news is not good:

employees can miss up to 5 extra days of work because of after school issues . . .

and parents say they’re often interrupted, distracted and drained of energy at work

by nonwork issues—significantly make errors and turn down requests to work extra

hours—and miss meetings and deadlines at work.

After school issues is something that Corporate Voices is working on as well.

From a JPMorgan Chase perspective, we’ve worked hard to give our employees the

flexibility to set an alternative work schedule if it makes sense for the business and

for their clients. Indeed, over 20 percent of our employees are on some kind of flexible work arrangement. Employers need to see this as an issue and look to the benefits of flexible work arrangements. But community stakeholders—community leaders, schools, local legislators—need to fund those community programs that keep

kids safe and supervised after school and to drive the development of new ones.

Employers like JPMorgan Chase can pave the way for tremendous change in child

care and education policies. I believe we’ve shown that there’s a bottom line benefit

of doing so—we see a more committed, talented workforce as a result—and studies

show the huge benefits of preparing our children well for the future.

We at JPMorgan Chase have put our ‘‘money where our month is.’’ And believe

the other companies you’ll hear from today, from IBM to Marriott, should be commended for doing so as well. We urge Congress and the Administration to make

early childhood education a priority for the country as well. We’ll be happy to continue to share our experiences and our successes with you to make sure this happens.

Senator ALEXANDER. Mr. Shum.

Mr. SHUM. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Clinton.

I am here today on behalf of Corporate Voices for Working Families. The 47 corporations that are members of Corporate Voices believe that elder care is an important business issue and one where

considerable corporate experience can be instructive to developing

public policy to support working families with elder care responsibilities.
37

As the demographics change, care giving for elderly relatives has

become and will continue to be a pressing concern for employers

and employees. Elder care giving is a responsibility that is expected to touch almost all families. The experience should not be

personally or financially devastating, but for many Americans

today, it is.

There is a myth that care giving is mostly a problem faced only

by women. This may have been true in the past, but men now

make up 44 percent of the care giving population. Another myth indicates that the most frail older people are cared for in nursing

homes. The number of older people in institutions are quite small

compared to those living in the community. And for those older

people in the community, family members provide 70 to 80 percent

of the care.

In a care giver’s role, he or she must balance the responsibilities

of serving their elders with the demands of job and career. Employees caring for older family members take time off from work to deal

with care issues, pass up promotions, training opportunities, reduce

contributions to their own retirement savings, and sometimes give

up work entirely and retire early.

The stress of care giving is linked significantly to higher rates of

physical and mental health problems. A 1999 study of the MetLife

Foundation of the National Alliance for Care Givers estimated that

American businesses lose at least $11 billion per year because of

employees needing to provide care for their loved ones. That study

estimates the total cost of business in the U.S. was nearly $30 billion for all costs associated with care giving.

IBM has continually seen elder care needs grow for its employees. In fact, the need has increased 200 percent since 1986. Today,

one-third of IBMers worldwide have elder care responsibilities.

That is about 100,000 employees. And, about half of our employee

population expect to have elder care responsibilities within the

next 5 years.

To address this, IBM has created a 5-year global elder care strategy to help our employees with care giving responsibilities. In

1988, we created the first national elder care resource and referral

service. This national infrastructure we created now serves about

4.3 million employees and 270 employers.

Almost half of our employees who used this service last year

have parents between the ages of 75 and 84, and 30 percent of the

employees have parents who live between 400 and 1,000 miles

away. This introduces a new complexity to this issue—long distance care giving.

By identifying employees’ needs and the company’s desire to

maintain corporate leadership in the field, IBM will continue its

elder care strategy. To this end, we have invested almost $5.5 million in more than 200 elder care projects.

Much has been accomplished and much has been learned. Investments to supporting working families with elder care responsibilities has consistently shown an increase in worker retention, productivity, and loyalty.

However, businesses have also learned that despite the investments, they cannot address the issue alone. Significant new action

is needed because of the growing magnitude of elder care, new pub-
38

lic policies, public/private partnerships are required to support family care giving to optimize the future workforce development.

Here are a couple of examples. Financial assistance and tax

breaks to help with the noncompensated cost for incidentals, such

as transportation, respite care, home modification, medical supplies, equipment, and medicines.

Another one would be the dependent care spending accounts, the

DECAP. Currently, the IRS definition as to what constitutes dependents is far too limited and prevents most families from being

able to have tax-deferred expenses associated with elder care in the

same way that employees are able to care for children.

In summary, elder care is a silent problem. While it is socially

acceptable to speak openly about the struggles with your child care

issues, no one will speak to the difficulties they are having with

their elderly relatives. In fact, you may even earn a badge of courage or sympathy from your coworkers as you explain that you were

up until 3:00 in the morning with a sick child, and they may even

offer help with a project that you have due that day.

But, no one will know that you were up until 3:00 in the morning

because your elderly relative became ill in their bed and you had

to help bathe them and put them back into bed. Just like child

care, elder care takes hearts and minds out of the workplace. In

fact, many employees will spend a longer time caring for their older

parents than they did for their children.

I thank you for the opportunity to share the compelling issues

that individuals face every day as they care for their elderly relatives.

Thank you.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you, Mr. Shum

[The prepared statement of Mr. Shum follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF MIKE SHUM

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee on Children & Families, my

name is Mike Shum, and I’m the Director of Global Workforce Diversity Operations

with IBM. I’m here today as a partner of Corporate Voices for Working Families.

Corporate Voices is a nonprofit organization with 45 member companies dedicated

to enabling corporations to more effectively collaborate with policymakers and other

stakeholders to accelerate the adoption and implementation of bi-partisan solutions

that improve the lives of all working families.

The 45 corporations that are members of Corporate Voices believe that elder care

is an important business issue. It is one where considerable corporate experience

can be instructive in developing public policies to support working families with

elder care responsibilities.

As the demographics change, care giving for elderly relatives has become and will

continue to be more and more of a pressing concern to employers and their employees. Concerns about care giving for the elderly are rising rapidly. As our population

ages, care giving is a responsibility that is expected to touch nearly all families. The

experience should not be personally or financially devastating. For many Americans

today, it is.

More than one-quarter of the adult population has provided care for a chronically

ill, disabled, or aged family member or friend during the past year, according to recent studies.

In February 2003, the Pew Research Center found that the proportion of Americans worrying about having to care for an aging parent or relative has more than

doubled since 1988 to 44 percent. Other studies have found that within corporations

that percentage is even higher—54 percent of working Americans expects to take

on elder care responsibilities in the next 3–5 years.

More than half of caregivers (53 percent to 64 percent) under the age of 65 are

employed outside the home. In 1997, it was estimated the total number of employed
39

caregivers would be 15.6 million by 2007—roughly 10 percent of employees. Yet,

more recent data suggest there may already be over 28 million employed caregivers!

There is a myth that care giving is mostly a problem faced only by women—this

may have been true in the past, but men now make up 44 percent of the care giving

population.

Contrary to the myth that most frail older people are cared for in nursing homes,

the number in institutions is quite small compared to those living in the community.

And for those older people in the community, family members provide 70–80 percent of the care elderly persons need to stay independent and in the community as

long as possible.

Home care is a $32 billion business and $83 billion is spent a year on paid nursing home care; that is dwarfed by the data showing that family care giving amounts

to an economic contribution of $196 billion and will always be the biggest contributor to care giving.

The prevalence of elder care will only get greater—the population over 85 (those

most in need of care giving) is the fastest growing segment of the population and

half of them need help with personal care.

In addition, the pool of family caregivers is dwindling. In 1990 there were 11 potential caregivers for every person requiring care, in 2050 there will be just four.

As our population ages, care giving is a responsibility that is expected to touch

nearly all families.

Employees’ elder care giving responsibilities have been a growing issue for many

years—a trend that will continue and accelerate as the work force ages.

Nearly one in every four households cares for an older family member, and nearly

two thirds of the caregivers are employed.

Caring for an older relative consumes an average of 12 to 13.5 hours each week,

or 2 to 10 hours a day, depending on whether an employee is the primary caregiver

or sharing care duties with other family members. Most caregivers will have these

responsibilities for more than 6 1⁄2 years.

Whatever the employed caregiver’s role, he or she must balance the responsibilities of serving their elders with the demands of job and career.

Employees caring for older family members take time from work to deal with care

issues, pass up promotion and training opportunities, reduce contributions to their

own retirement savings, and sometimes give up work entirely and retire early. The

stress of care giving is linked to significantly higher rates of physical and mental

health problems.

Elder care is less visible in the workplace than child care, because employees tend

not to talk about their elder care responsibilities in the same way they talk about

their children.

In fact, 80 percent of 1,200 organizations surveyed by Eckerd College’s Human

Resource Institute in 2000 said they either ‘‘did not know or had to guess at the

percentage of caregivers in their workforce’’. But while many employers may not be

as aware of the issue, the effects are as real and the scale of the problem is as great.

A study comparing the workplace effects of child care and elder care responsibilities showed that workers who care for older family members in their homes have

more symptoms of anxiety, irritability, depression, and physical illness than those

with child dependents.

Elder Care is a ‘‘Silent’’ problem. While it is socially acceptable to speak openly

about the struggles with your child care issue, no one will speak to the difficulties

they are having with an elderly relative.

In fact, you can ‘‘earn’’ a badge of courage and sympathy from your co-workers

when you explain you were up till 3:00 in the morning with a sick child. They may

even offer to help with the project you have due today.

But, no one will know when you were up till 3:00 in the morning because your

elderly relative became ill in their bed and you had to help bathe them and put

them back to bed. Elder Care has taken more hearts and minds from the workplace

than child care ever has or ever will.

A 1999 study by the Met Life Foundation and The National Alliance for Care giving estimates that American business loses at least $11 billion per year because of

employees needing to provide care for loved ones over 50. That study estimated the

total cost to business in the U.S. is nearer to $30 billion for all costs associated with

care giving.

Over the next decade, the number of employees caring for older relatives is expected to double. American businesses can expect additional productivity impacts

over the coming decade as the number of elder caregivers in the work force grows.

And they can expect to lose valuable employees for whom the strain of working and

care giving becomes too difficult.
40

About one in five employed caregivers (18 percent of those under age 65) quit

their jobs to provide care. Another 42 percent reduced the number of hours they

work.

What is almost impossible to estimate are the costs associated with the loss of

productivity due to employees being understandably preoccupied with the problems

associated with caring for loved ones when they are at work.

If your mother or father has Alzheimer’s Disease and lives hundreds of miles

away, you are likely to spend a great deal of time, both on and off the job, thinking

about your parent, and your parent’s problems and safety.

You are also likely to spend a large amount of time at work on the phone making

arrangements for your family member’s care.

Elder care giving can also have devastating consequences for one’s family. According to a study by Brandeis University’s Center on Women and Aging, care giving

costs individuals an average of $659,000 in lost wages, pension and Social

Security contributions.

Whereas 35 percent of the overall population has an annual household income of

under $30,000, among care giving families that number is 43 percent.

No wonder, then, that six in ten (61 percent) of ‘‘intense’’ family caregivers (those

providing 21 or more hours of care per week) showed clinical symptoms of depression.

This is a problem that is not going to go away. As our population ages, more and

more employees, and, therefore more and more employers, are going to be impacted

by care giving.

There are many areas where employers can not only lessen the burdens that care

giving places on their employees, but also lessen absenteeism and increase employee

loyalty and retention.

Now I would like to brief you on IBM’s Eldercare Strategy.

IBM has continually seen the need for elder care grow for its employees. In fact,

in the U.S., the need has increased 200 percent since 1986 (9 percent to 27 percent).

And this is not just a U.S. issue.

From IBM’s 2001 Global Work/Life survey, 45 percent of employees in Asia Pacific, 41 percent in Latin America (up from 33 percent in 1998), 26 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa and 25 percent in Canada have responsibilities for elders.

Today, one third of IBMers worldwide have elder care responsibilities—that’s

about 100,000 employees. And about half expect to have elder care responsibilities

in the next 5 years.

To address this, IBM created a 5-year Global Elder Care Strategy with three components: employees as elder caregivers; employees’ elders and employees as mature

workers.

According to IBM’s recent studies, the ‘‘ideal’’ workplace of the future for the elder

caregiver will offer:

• Flexible hours for employees

• Managers who respect working caregivers

• Family-friendly culture

• Healthcare benefits that recognize dependent care for older relatives and the

mature worker

• Access to a low-cost care manager

• Access to information about community resources and services.

Getting closer to this ideal workplace is an important business strategy for IBM,

so the company can attract and retain top talent in the industry and help employees

meet their needs to balance work and personal lives.

That’s why we’ve invested almost $5.5 million dollars in more than 200 elder care

projects.

In 1988 we were the first companies to add national elder care to our existing

child care resource and referral service in the U.S., which is now known as

Lifeworks.

Forty-eight percent of employees who used our elder care resource and referral

services last year have parents between 75–84 years old and 30 percent of employees have parents who live between 400–1,000 miles away.

IBM has a wide span of supportive programs and services that starts with the

community level where IBM works with local employees and communities to identify specific challenges and solutions to those challenges.

For example:

• IBM hosts elder care support meetings for our employees.

• IBM sponsors elder care fairs in the workplace.

• The company provides tip sessions on areas of specific interest for employees.
41

• IBM surveys employees regularly to continue to refresh and learn about emerging issues. • And the company’s research and development for elder care transportation resulted in the elder care driving kit and community-specific elder care transportation

services.

On a national level, through the American Business Collaboration for Quality Dependent Care—a collaboration of corporations formed in 1992 and committed to ‘‘do

together what none of us can afford to do alone—IBM has: • Developed kits to educate employees about how to help their elder relatives’

transition out of self-transportation. • Worked on projects for elder day care facilities to address the issues of quality

dependent care through accreditation models.

IBM’s major elder care programs include:

• Long-Term Care Plan—offers employees the option to purchase insurance for

eligible family members at group rates. Benefits help pay expenses relating to disabilities or illnesses when people can no longer care for themselves. • Counseling and Referral through LifeWorks—IBM offers a free elder care

counseling and referral service to help employee’s and their family locate elder care

service providers such as medical services and in-home services; housing arrangements; nursing homes, etc. • Lifeline Personal Response Service—Emergency care to an employee’s older

or physically challenged relative at the touch of a button. The service is available

24 hours a day. Waterproof wrist or neck help buttons, designed to be worn at all

times, combined with a phone monitoring unit that uses voice prompt features,

make Lifeline simple to use. • Elder Care Webinars—An Online Seminar or ‘‘Webinar’’ uses a collaborative

tool to deliver a Web-based seminar to employees. Webinars are delivered live by

LifeWorks trainers, experts in their field, and facilitated by a technical meeting

host. • Elder Care Moderated Chats—Designed to help IBM employees share information, advice and support with the guidance of an expert. Moderated chats are

held weekly for an hour, over a period of 4 weeks. • Generations on Line—Easy-to-use software will teach even the most skeptical

elders to use the Internet and e-mail! Net-surfing is possible in 25 languages! • SeniorNet, a partnership designed to provide elder relatives (55 and older)

with training and an introduction to technology in centers around the country (we’ve

just announced a grant of 660k with SeniorNet and Generations Online to provide

simplified Internet access to older adults in over 1,000 communities). • Intergenerational Programs—A program to pair individuals from SeniorNet

with school age programs. It is particularly popular with people from cultures who

really value the interaction between elders and young children.

• And IBM provides a series of topic-specific tapes, booklets and pamphlets and,

most recently, the comprehensive Elder Care Management Services, which

allow employees to have an in home care assessment or a facility assessment to better understand the needs and options for their elders.

Let me briefly outline the third component of IBM’s strategy—the mature worker.

IBM defines mature workers as employees 50 and over.

Older workers are remaining in the workforce—the early retirement trend is reversing. Employees want to work longer—but differently. We know that most of

IBM’s mature workers would prefer to retire gradually.

In addition, there will be a shortage of IT workers—a 1.6 million shortage by

2005, so it’s important to address the company’s mature workers’ needs now.

The average age of IBM’s U.S. workforce is 42, up from 40 last year. And IBM’s

customers are getting older too.

As a result of this maturing workforce, IBM plans to build on its existing foundation of services, programs and policies to develop a leading edge, comprehensive response to attract and retain mature workers.

By identifying employees’ needs, what IBM knows is good business sense, and the

company’s desire to maintain corporate leadership in this field, IBM will continue

its three-pronged strategy.

Just as employers adapted to the unprecedented entry of women into the work

force in the second half of the 20th century, so they will need to adapt to this equally momentous demographic shift toward an aging society.

The employer response to the entry of women was gradual and lagged significantly behind the needs and opportunities presented by the labor force change. We

now know that many employers gained competitive advantage and improved productivity by introducing policies and benefits that encouraged the recruitment and retention of talented women and addressed the needs of working couples and parents.
42

In the same way, employers today face new challenges and opportunities related

to an aging work force, one of which is increasing numbers of employees, men and

women, who must arrange for or provide care to aged family members.

The challenges these working families face, on a day-to-day basis, represent a

very high cost to the business bottom line. Because of this understanding and to

reduce these costs, American corporations have been investing in policies and programs to support employees with elder care responsibilities for over 15 years.

Much has been accomplished and much has been learned. Investments to support

working families with elder care responsibilities have consistently shown an increase in workforce retention, productivity and loyalty.

However, businesses have also learned that despite the investment, they cannot

address the issues alone. Significant new action is needed because of the growing

magnitude of elder care. New public policies and public private partnerships are required to support family care giving and to optimize future workforce development.

Some of those pressing issues include:

• Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Family members caring for elderly parents may need more than 12 weeks, especially when a parent or loved one is nearing end of life.

• Flexibility in working hours and/or ability to use sick leave for caring for family

members.

• Financial assistance and tax breaks to help with the noncompensated costs for

incidentals, transportation, respite care, home modifications, medical supplies,

equipment and medicines.

Dependent Care Spending Accounts (DECAP). Current IRS definitions of what

constitute a dependent elder are too limited and prevent most families from being

able to tax-defer expenses associated with elder care in the same way employees are

able to for child care expenses.

• Respite care services to relieve stressed caregivers are sorely needed.

• Availability of affordable long-term care insurance to cover the catastrophic

costs of nursing home care or in home health care services.

I thank you for this opportunity to share with you today the compelling issues

that individuals struggle with every day as they care for their elderly relatives.

Senator ALEXANDER. Carol Evans.

Ms. EVANS. Thank you, Senator Alexander.

I would like to tell you a little bit about our list. It is quite a

famous list. It gets about 800 million media impressions every year

when it hits the newsstand in October.

It was started back in 1986 by Vivian Cadden, who was our first

editor. She was a personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and a very

interesting lady. She had a very simple idea. She thought that if

she could get CEOs to compete every year, to make a list that

would acknowledge the companies that are doing the most for

working mothers, that she could get one CEO to be jealous of another CEO being on that list, and by that jealousy, actually have

them focus their attention, which is very limited—I mean, how

much time can a CEO spend on any one issue—to focus their attention on the needs of our readers. Of course, that is exactly what

happened.

Two decades later, almost, the list has become the measure of

how American companies should lead in this area, and how they

should treat their working mother employees on so many issues. In

fact, the application for this list, as many in this room know, has

535 questions. We ask every imaginable question about how employers treat their working parent employees, on everything ranging from whether you have a lactation room in the office, your flexibility policies, child care policies, all of the issues that relate to

elder care, many of the issues that we are addressing here today.

These are quantified on the application form, measured by a computer, and an actual ranking of companies comes up that we use

to create our list.
43

I doubt that Vivian Cadden, actually, so many years ago, would

have had any idea of the enormous impact of this list. The reason

why this list has had such an impact is because the need is so

strong.

I want to make a very clear case here about something, though,

which came up in your questioning, Senator Alexander, and that

is that there is an enormous amount of joy in the idea of a lifestyle

of being a working mother. Many, many working mothers come to

their jobs with a sense of great exhilaration, challenge, creativity,

looking forward to being able to contribute to a productive American society in the way that they do. The fact that they want to

contribute and want to lead, in fact, American companies is really

important for us to get into our heads when we look at what we

need to do for working parents.

This is not just about the care and feeding of children. That is

an incredibly important part, but it is also about the psyche of the

American woman, though, and what she wants to be doing and

how she wants to be contributing to the American world today.

We have seen incredible changes in the work family landscape.

More women are in top ranks because of maternity leave and phase

back programs allow them to remain on track. There are many

more on-site child care centers today, and a lot of companies realize

that it’s not just about creating a headquarters child care center,

but really spreading out the care among all the employees nationwide. The increase in aid and leave for adopting parents has been

a huge sea change and, of course, flextime not only allows parents

a sense of balance, but also a sense of control, which is incredibly

important.

Family-friendly benefits—I want to make a statement on that,

too. They are very good for American companies. Steve Sanger, the

CEO of General Mills, said it very well at our conference last October. He said, ‘‘Work life benefits aren’t expensive. Turnover is.’’

That’s a huge point. Being able to attract talent and being able to

keep talent in American companies, being able to make women a

very important and vital part of our workforce, is what this is all

about.

But, there is also good news, in that there is an ROI that we

have seen on programs that the 100 best companies institute. In

fact, last year a study from Cornell University by Daniel Simon

said that there was a billion dollars of market cap per company

that they could identify for companies on our list, that was related

to customer satisfaction that he traced back to employee satisfaction. A billion dollars of market cap per company, that’s a huge

amount of value created by working mothers and working fathers.

Every year, we raise the bar on what makes a company an employer of choice for working mothers, and there are five trends I

want to identify today. One is child care programs, of course, which

are very important. But, what companies are doing—and Joy mentioned this very nicely—companies are adding to the basics of child

care by adding after-school programs, vacation care, and kindergarten. I have been to the JPMorgan center in Manhattan. What

a place that is, right in downtown Manhattan, where children are

playing and having fun. It’s an amazing sight.
44

Of course, IBM, one of the leaders in this area, has 63 on or near

site child care centers that they support all across the country.

Companies like Marriott give child care credits and contract with

child care centers to give a discount to their employees, an equally

valuable idea.

Two, adoption aid has become very important. Today, 48 percent

of the 100 best companies offer paid adoption leave and some support for adoption payments as well. It’s a very high percentage.

Three is support for parents with teens and’ tweens. We all think

about the trials and tribulations that Mr. and Mrs. Martinez are

going through with their 7- and 8-year-olds. But, what about teens

and’ tweens? When you have big kids, you have very big problems.

I can tell you that because I have a 17-year-old and a 14-year-old.

Actually, what happens is that also, as women reach the top of

their careers, and when they are the most productive and most

helpful to their companies and to the American society and productivity, is when their kids are older. Then, those problems hit and

how do you handle that? JPMorgan Chase and Eli Lilly both have

incredible programs designed to help parents of older kids, even

teaching courses to employees about how to manage teenagers, so

when they go back home, they know what to do.

Four is flexible scheduling and benefits for part-time workers.

One-hundred percent of the 100 best companies have flextime

scheduling. That is a huge difference from most companies in the

country today. The effectiveness of programs like compressed work

weeks, tele-commuting and flextime really showed up after 9/11,

when companies in New York City and in Washington, DC were

able to rely on systems that they had put in place to create flexibility. Those systems saved a lot of companies from having an even

more disastrous time during those horrible days and months after

9/11.

The fifth trend is that companies are helping employees with

life’s emergencies, something that we really didn’t predict when we

started the list. Emergency situations, child care, even a sick babysitter or sick child care provider, elder care emergencies, these are

huge. It is estimated that companies lose $12 billion a year due to

absences. So, companies are really working hard on how to create

a support system that really impacts these kinds of emergency situations.

Another small point I want to make is that this is not just for

moms or dads equally benefiting from this. When men use work

life benefits, a point that we have been telling to all of our male

friends, when men use work life benefits, the stigma of having

these benefits just for women is lifted. That has a gigantic impact

on women’s careers, as companies make choices of who to move up

further and farther into P&L responsibilities. We encourage all

men to take their vacations, for example, and also to take advantage of paternity leave, of which there are now many companies offering paid paternity leave, one of the things we measure for the

100 best companies.

Of course, there are many, many problems. Even big companies,

even Fortune 1000 companies who aren’t on our list, are lacking in

some of these very basic benefits. And, then you look at the companies who have less than 50 employees, who aren’t even covered by
45

the FMLA. There are huge problems, where so many companies

don’t even have to give basic paid maternity leave, or basic maternity leave benefits. That means that 40 percent of America’s workforce is not covered by maternity leave laws.

Finally, I want to mention the welfare-to-work mothers, of which

there are so many today, are in a double bind of having no affordable child care and being required to work full-time jobs. It is a

very difficult double bind, what I would almost call a double jeopardy for welfare-to-work moms. We need to straighten that out and

need to figure that out.

Companies are doing so much for employees, especially the 100

companies that make the list every year for the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers. We are proud of those companies. But,

it is not enough just to rely on corporate America. You know that,

we all know that. Everybody needs help from the Government. We

are asking you to take a very close look at programs that can support working families.

There was a very interesting law passed in California that created family leave laws for smaller companies and for all employees

in that State, where employees are contributing money to be able

to draw back down when they have children.

We also want to look at the part-time worker employee situation.

We want to have a great focus on the child care problem. The New

York Times recently wrote a very interesting editorial about a $6

billion welfare/child care bill that’s in the Senate, and we think

that is a wonderful start. We also think the Senate and the Congress should support Head Start every year and not have that become a big issue, as it seems to come up every time it needs funding.

So, we’re in this together, corporate America with Government,

with working families, and we are so proud of the work that Working Mothers is doing to make this country one of the most highly

productive countries in the world. We think their contribution is essential to our economy. In fact, I like to give credit to Working

Mothers for the great economic State that the country has been in

for the last 25 years. But, we believe there is so much support that

they need and we are so grateful to you for taking the time out of

your incredibly busy schedules to look at these issues.

Thank you.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you very much, Ms. Evans.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Evans follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF CAROL EVANS

One of the reasons that I came back to acquire Working Mother magazine in

2001—3 weeks before 9/11—was the remarkable legacy of the magazine’s founding

editor Vivian Cadden.

A personal friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, Vivian launched the list we now call the

100 Best Companies for Working Mothers in 1986. That first list acknowledged companies offering some kind—any kind—of solution for working mothers. She knew

that getting CEOs to compete to be the employer of choice for working mothers

would catalyze change.

And it has. Almost 2 decades later, the list—with its competitive analysis of over

400 different elements of work/life programs for working parents—has become the

measure of how leading companies should deal with the important needs of working

mothers and fathers, ranging from maternity and paternity leave, breastfeeding and

flextime to elder care and child care. Our list sets a standard for others to live up

to.
46

1Making the Working Mother 100 Best Companies list increased customer satisfaction by

between one and five points on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI). Cornell University Economics Professor Daniel Simon concluded that the 100 Best winners significantly

boosted their worth because their generous work/life benefits resulted in happier, harder-working employees who, in turn, provided customers with better-quality products and better services.

(Daniel Simon, Happy Employees, Happy Customers: Understanding the Relationship Between

Human Resource Management and Practices, Labor Market Opportunities and Customer Satisfaction, study, Cornell University, 2002)

But I doubt that even the visionary Vivian Cadden could have predicted the impact of Working Mother‘s 100 Best list on corporate America: what a coveted award

this would become, or how it would lead to a sea change in corporate America and

in the lives of all working parents. Every year, hundreds of companies vie for a spot

on the list. Human Resource departments carry the list into the corner office as evidence of what can and needs to be done. Companies began keeping records of the

numbers of employees using programs so they can compete to make the list. And

that has led to real change: What gets measured gets done.

Significant changes in the family-friendly work landscape include:

• More women in top corporate ranks, as maternity leave and phase-back programs mean women can have families and remain on track;

• Increased number of on- and near-site child care facilities as well as resource

and referral services;

• Advent of aid and leave for parents adopting children; and

• Flextime scheduling that allows America’s working parents to balance work and

family commitments.

Of course, corporate America would not have made these changes had the bottom

line not improved as a result. Family-friendly benefits are good for business, good

for the economy and good for the country. In the words of Steve Sanger, CEO of

General Mills: ‘‘Work/life benefits aren’t expensive; turnover is.’’

The 100 Best Companies find that programs that support working parents increase productivity and build employee loyalty. In fact, a Cornell University study

by economics professor Daniel Simon found that the 100 Best winners have more

satisfied employees and therefore, more satisfied customers, which correlates to substantially higher stock values.1

Every year, companies continue to raise the bar on what makes a company the

employer-of-choice for women. Here are some key new trends at leading companies:

1. Child Care Programs Increase. Companies are adding to what they offer in

child care to include afterschool, vacation and sick-child care, as well as kindergarten. According to the Children’s Defense Fund, full-day child care costs $4,000

to $10,000 per year. Of the 100 Best, 63 percent offer on- or near-site child care.

Another 96 percent offer resource and referral services and reimbursements. At

the company that wrote the book on corporate child care—IBM—parents have access to 63 on- or near-site child care centers across the country. Marriott offers

pretax set-asides for child care and has contracted with a network of caregivers who

give employees an average discount of 10 percent for full-time, before- and afterschool care and some backup care.

2. Adoption aid. One of our readers wrote to thank us for calling attention to

adoption benefits in our 100 Best list, saying, ‘‘Because many employees base their

paid leave benefits on pregnancy’s classification as short-term disability, most adoptive parents aren’t allowed comparable paid leave. An adoption may require additional time to promote bonding or extended travel for international adoptions, so

adoptive parents are often put in the difficult financial situation of taking extended

unpaid leave.’’ Of the 100 Best, 48 percent offer paid adoption leave.

3. Support for parents with teens and’ tweens. As the mother of two teenagers,

I KNOW how hard this is. Big kids equal big problems. The issues are compounded

by the fact that by the time women are dealing with teens, they have achieved a

high level of responsibility in the workplace. To help such women, some companies

are offering innovations. For example, JPMorgan Chase has designed afterschool

and vacation programs to help fill a nationwide shortage for the postplayground set.

Eli Lilly offers ‘‘Safe Sitter’’ workshops for employees’ children, where during vacations, kids learn how to earn money and take responsibility for younger siblings.

Pearson Education gives an Active Parenting of Teens workshop series on sexuality,

self-esteem, violence and discipline. GIaxoSmithKline offers an SAT prep course.

4. Flexible scheduling and benefits for part-time workers. One hundred percent

of the 100 Best Companies now have some sort of flexible scheduling—even in manufacturing industries and those that operate 24/7. The effectiveness of programs like

compressed workweeks, telecommuting and flextime were validated post9/11. In addition to fostering an independent working environment, companies were able to
47

2MetLife Study of Employer Costs for Working Caregivers, June 1997.

maintain ‘‘business as usual’’ through programs like telecommuting and part-time

work arrangements. Also important: Many of those 100 Best employees who work

a part-time schedule of as few as 15 hours a week have access to benefits.

5. And the last trend I’ll mention: Companies are helping employees with life’s

emergencies, like elder-care issues or sick and emergency child care. Pernille Spiers

Lopez, president of IKEA North America—named as our Family Champion this

year—says, ‘‘Take care of your personal life, and the work will follow.’’ It’s estimated

that companies loose at least $12 billion a year, due to absences—many of which

can be tied to life’s little emergencies like dealing with an elderly parent or a sick

child. 2 Financial company PNC sends a trained geriatric specialist into the home

to assess and plan for living issues for an elderly parent, such as nutrition, medicine, safety and psychological needs. KPMG offers 60 hours of in-home emergency

dependent care.

It’s clear that these benefits aren’t just for moms—they’re for everyone. More dads

at the 100 Best are taking advantage of these benefits. When men use work/life benefits such as parental leave or flextime, it helps lift the stigma for women.

And companies are realizing their employees need support in all stages of life.

The 20-something employee needs time to get degrees or get exercise. New parents

need time off to care for a baby. The seasoned worker has to handle a troubled teen

or an ailing parent.

Now the 100 Best Companies are amazing—but there are only 100 of them. They

employ only slightly more than 2 percent of the over 138 million employed Americans. There are millions of employees who still don’t have access to programs and

benefits to help them balance their work and family lives, including some at Fortune 1,000 companies and in smaller businesses and especially at those not covered

by FMLA (which affects only 6 percent of the Nation’s businesses).

There’s still much to be done. Only a handful of companies offer any paid parental

leave, and only a few offer job guarantees beyond FMLA, so millions of families need

the government’s help today. Forty percent of the labor force is not entitled to leave.

The New York Times recently reported that ‘‘only 15 percent of children eligible for

federally financed child care actually get it. More than 400,000 children will fall off

the rolls over the next 5 years. That will mean disaster for their families.’’ And the

double bind of required work hours and no affordable child care that faces welfare

moms is untenable.

Companies can do a great deal to support their working family employees, but it’s

only part of the solution.

We are asking you to support programs to help America’s working families. A national paid family leave law like that recently implemented in California would be

a great start. And let’s continue the conversation about helping the part-time workers in America.

And we must continue to work toward a solution to America’s serious childcare

problem. The $6 billion welfare/childcare bill in the Senate is a great start. We at

Working Mother also stress the importance of continued support for Headstart.

Thank you for your attention to the issue. Together, we can make a difference for

America’s children, for working parents and for our country’s economy.

APPENDIX I

How the companies on Working Mother magazine’s 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers list compare with the companies nationwide:

100% of 100 Best offer flextime vs. 55% nationwide

99% of 100 Best offer an employee assistance program vs. 67% nationwide

98% of 100 Best offer elder-care resource and referral services vs. 20% nationwide

96% of 100 Best offer child care resource and referral vs. 18% nationwide

94% of 100 Best offer compressed workweeks vs. 31% nationwide

93% of 100 Best offer job sharing vs. 22% nationwide

77% of 100 Best offer therapeutic massages vs. 11% nationwide.

47% of 100 best sponsor sick-child care vs. 7% nationwide

44% of 100 best offer before/afterschool care vs. 4% nationwide

39% of 100 Best offer paid paternity leave vs. 12% nationwide

27% of 100 Best offer paid maternity leave beyond the short-term disability period

vs. 14% nationwide

Senator ALEXANDER. This has been very helpful for us and for

the entire U.S. Senate. This is the way we do our work. We make

a record, we put a spotlight on the issues, we invite those who
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know what they’re talking about to come here and share their wisdom with us. You have been especially helpful in your testimony,

because you have been specific about the things that you think we

could do.

I would like to invite you, after you reflect on this, if you have

any further thoughts, we would like to have them. If you would

like to make a list in a little different way, let me suggest this:

There are some big ideas that many of you have suggested; there

are some expensive ideas. But, you should make a list for us starting with the easiest things to do and working up to the hardest

that would help put the Federal Government on the side of parents

raising children. Now, we will include elder care in that as well,

Mr. Shum, because that is an important part of it. But we can

work on several things at once, and while we’re working on the

tougher things or the more expensive things, there is no need to

ignore the things that we might be able to just agree on and get

done.

I am thinking not just about things that we need to proactively

do, but some of you have suggested some barriers in the way. So,

if you have time to do that, I would welcome that, and I am sure

Senator Clinton and other members of the committee would as

well.

Now, Senator Clinton and I have a vote in a few minutes, so we

will have to wrap this up shortly. But, why don’t I ask one question

and then ask Senator Clinton if she would like to ask a question,

and as long as we have time, we will alternate, and if you will be

brief in your answers, that will give of us a chance to ask questions.

Let me go to you, Ms. Klein. You mentioned the Advance EITC

problem. Tell me exactly what we need to do about that.

Ms. KLEIN. The Advanced EITC is very cumbersome for employees to apply for. What it does is give them the money and, rather

than at the end of the year, it puts it in their paycheck, which is

much more family-friendly, if you will. They can spend it on real

weekly expenditures, whether it’s utility bills or transportation, etc.

The process is very cumbersome because it requires a lot of documentation, a lot of record keeping. It requires a lot of work on the

part of the employer to get the employees enrolled because it is the

employer’s role to do that. They can’t apply for it individually. It’s

very cumbersome. It’s just a very user unfriendly piece of legislation.

I think that was complicated this year, because the IRS did roll

out a pilot to do some precertification on EITC applicants in general. That made it doubly burdensome for Advanced EITC. I think

that pilot did occur last fall and it is ongoing. We would like to see

and be involved in discussions about any kind of precertification or

modifications to Advanced EITC. That would be, I think, as you

pointed out, a very cost effective thing to do.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you.

Senator Clinton.

Senator CLINTON. Thank you very much.

I also want to thank the corporations that are represented here

for their commitment to this, and recognize Marriott’s long time

commitment to employing welfare workers and getting them into
49

the workforce, which has been a tremendous success. We really

thank you for that.

One of the mysteries to me is, as I have been involved in these

issues now for a long time, it seems like, both on a personal level,

balancing family and work and worrying about sick care givers and

all kinds of other challenges. I have attended innumerable meetings and conferences. I have visited child care centers in every kind

of setting you can imagine, emergency backup centers as well as

more traditional ones. I have read the reports that seem to come

out every year underscoring the benefits to businesses for these

kinds of investments.

And, here we are in 2004 having yet another hearing on these

matters, because we still have a big problem. As Mr. Shum’s testimony pointed out, from his IBM experience, we are heading for the

biggest ‘‘sandwich generation’’ crisis that one can possibly imagine.

Mr. Chairman, I recently met a 75-year-old woman who is now

caring for her 95-year-old mother, and her 52-year-old daughter

who just was in a serious automobile accident. The longer we live,

the more those responsibilities will increase. We are right on the

cusp of seeing an incredible conflict between the productivity needs

and the personal desires of our workforce, men and women—but

we all know most of the burden falls on women—and are not prepared for it. We don’t have a structure in place. We don’t have the

right incentives in our tax system. We just are behind the curve.

I guess the first question I would like to ask each of the representatives of Marriott and JPMorgan and IBM, and of course,

Carol Evans, who follows this. What do we need to do to both make

the case more effectively, and if you could do one thing, either in

the private or public sector, that would encourage more businesses

to follow your lead, to make the investments, what would it be? Ms.

Klein?

Ms. KLEIN. Thank you. That is the reason Corporate Voices was

founded 3 years ago. Our charter, what we are funded to do, is to

communicate the business case to medium and small sized companies. Right now, you have large corporations and big brand companies, consumer brand companies, that are involved because of a lot

of branding issues, etc.

But, the medium and small sized companies are who we need to

reach. We issued a report today—and it’s available on the side

table—and it identifies and articulates 15 company best practices

for low wage and hourly earners. We will be disseminating that

through the chambers, through the Business Roundtable, etc., to

small, small companies throughout the country. That is exactly the

reason we exist. So, we hope we are beginning to make a dent into

that.

I think your point is well taken. I don’t think it is that the companies don’t want to do any kind of supportive policies and programs. I really think they don’t know about it.

Senator CLINTON. I think that’s a fair comment. There is still a

lot of mythology out there about what it means. I would love to get

a copy of that report on the side table, too, if somebody could

maybe grab that for me.

Ms. Bunson?
50

Ms. BUNSON. I would actually echo what Donna just said. I think

that many companies—you know, I think probably everybody here

in this room with a vested interest in this issue has sat through

many forums like this, where the business case is very clear. But,

I don’t know that, on a national level, we have had a real concerted

campaign, essentially, to get the business community enrolled, the

business community being large and small employees, about the

value of providing these kinds of support services to working parents.

Having been in this field for maybe 14 years now, I think the attention at the national level is a little bit episodic in that it ebbs

and flows. My experience in the business world is you can’t give up

because of that. Getting attention for a short time and then lose

attention are things that business leaders start to question. And,

what we’re talking about is a long-term strategy for change.

So, I think some sort of a campaign that would really say, you

know what, this issue is critical, it’s critical to the country, it’s critical to our employees, it’s critical to our competitiveness, and it is

not going away, in compelling language, would make a huge difference for issues that employees face both in dealing with parenting issues as well as elder care concerns.

Senator CLINTON. Thank you.

Mr. Shum?

Mr. SHUM. Thank you.

Two things. We found that flexibility is not just a nice thing to

do. It is a business imperative. We have also found that there is

a direct correlation between a manager who believes in flexibilities

and allows flexibility practices in his or her department and the

employee morale and productivity for that particular group. There

is a direct relationship.

We also have done a number of work life surveys, and we asked

questions like ‘‘what would be the things that would cause you to

leave IBM before your time?’’ Work life issues typically come in

around number three or so. But, for three groups of employees—

our top performers, employees under 40, and women—the number

one reason was work life balance. So, those things have made it

very compelling for us, and that’s the story that we tell.

Senator CLINTON. What percentage of your total workforce are

those three categories; do you know?

Mr. SHUM. I don’t have that exact percentage with me right at

the moment.

Senator CLINTON. That is a significant number. Thank you.

Mr. SHUM. Yes.

Senator CLINTON. Ms. Evans?

Ms. EVANS. Well, on the small and medium sized companies

point, first of all our list has no limit on size, either up or down.

So, we have lots of small companies that apply and we have lots

of small companies that make this list. I think it’s very interesting.

Patagonia has only 492 employees, and they have made the list for

years. JFK Medical Center, many hospitals that focus very clearly

on their female employees because they have a very high percentage, are doing great, great things.

The small companies say, oh, the big companies have so many

resources, it’s easy for them. And the big companies say, oh, the
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small companies have so few employees, that it’s easy for them.

The truth is that they both can do it.

But, I think institutionalizing some of the things that just make

logical sense is such an important point. For example, when you

take flexibility, if you can take flexibility from being the manager’s

discretion and you say this flexibility is required to be allowed by

every manager and every department, and we will set up a template that reflects the reality of that department, but it will follow

flexibility rules for the company, then every employee gets flexibility, not just the ones who have a really nice manager. This is what

we’re trying to encourage companies to do, is to institutionalize.

One thing that the Government can do, very importantly, is to

look at their relationship with their employees—and the Government is probably still the biggest employer in the country. You

should look at how the Government could institutionalize flexibility

for their employees, and lead as an example. I mean, the Government can be, and is in many cases, a test case of how flexibility,

how child care, how all of these benefits for employees can work

for American businesses.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you again. I think we’re coming up

so close to voting time, Senator Clinton, that it is time to wrap this

up.

This has been very helpful. It coincides with the release of some

important new research and information by two of the witnesses’

organizations here today. You have given us specific suggestions

about how we can work on this, and we will continue to focus in

this Subcommittee on Children and Families on the job of being a

parent, and this discussion today on workplace and family-friendly

workplaces has been very helpful.

I would like to thank our staff, which has worked awfully hard

putting this together. Marguerite Sallee and Page Curry have done

a terrific job working with Senator Dodd’s staff. Thank you very

much.

The hearing is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 11:45 a.m., the subcommittee adjourned.]

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