Family Responsibility Leave - All Canadian Jurisdictions

Flexible Working – the Right to Request

Right to request flexible work has not caused problems for most employers

Want to present a skit or role play at a conference or meeting...professional scripts for 7-8 minutes skits are now available online

Canadian Association of Family Enterprise (CAFÉ) Regina Branch hosted Judith MacBride-King March 13 - speaking on Recruitment and Retention and Work-Family Balance

On March 13, Café Regina partnered with the Work and Family Branch to sponsor Judith MacBride-King, formerly of the Conference Board of Canada, to speak on Recruitment, Retention and Work-Family Balance for an educational outreach event in Regina.

Café Regina helps local business families connect and share experiences. For further information about CAFE, call CAFE Regina at: 306-522-9226 or e-mail regina@cafecanada.ca

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Interview with John deGraaf,

President of the Take Back Your Time organization

Today is October 24, and it is an exciting day to be interviewing you – it is Take Back Your Time Day.  I’m just wondering if you could start by telling us a little about what is this day about, and how is the day going in terms of activities, and I know you have some particular priorities so what priorities are you promoting in particular on this day?

John deGraaf: OK, let’s start with the day.  The day actually comes from the Take Back Your Time organization, which is really an organization formed to combat what we see as an epidemic of overwork and over scheduling and time poverty in the United Sates and in Canada.  The day October 24 has far more relevance to the U.S. situation than the Canadian for two reasons: the date October 24 falls 9 weeks before the end of the year, and it symbolizes the 9 full weeks more in annual working hours that Americans work compared to Western Europeans on the average.  We work somewhat more hours than Canadians – but Canadians are in the middle – they work more than Western Europeans, but not nearly as much as Americans do. 

October 24 is also significant to the U.S., because it is the anniversary of the date in 1938 that the Fair Labour Standards Act was passed, which guaranteed the 40-hour work week in the United States.  And our idea about that was that if people used that day for various kinds of events and discussions to talk about time poverty and overwork and what’s happening in this country that we might be able to mobilize, here and in Canada, we might be able to mobilize some change in both the culture’s attitude toward work and time, and also to public policies, particularly in the U.S. where there are simply no guarantees at all to vacation time or paid family leave as you have in Canada.

So do you have any particular planks that you are promoting at this time?

John deGraaf: You bet.  The day is probably not as significant this year as it has been in previous years – for a couple of reasons.  We’ve tended to focus this year on a policy priority and we’ve been working on that in some ways to the detriment of building the day itself.  In the first years of the organization – the first Take Back Your Time Day was in 2003, and the first years of the organization a lot of our focus was on that day and promoting that day and activities that day, and we’ve had had somewhere around 200 communities in the United States and quite a number in Canada as well that have had events for Take Back Your Time Day.  Most of these events tend to be fairly small – people get together in homes and house parties and talk about the issues.  There are public forums in various places; in Iowa City, Iowa, we’ve seen teach-ins at the University of Iowa on that day that have attracted somewhere between 1000-1500 people; so those have been the biggest events.  There have been a number of others teach-ins and forums in others cities that have attracted a couple of hundred of people to them.  Primarily we have not done so much of that the last couple of years and we have decided to focus on the ongoing campaign instead.  And this year, our priority, which is a little more problematic for the folks in Canada is on getting paid vacation law passed in the United States, because unlike in Canada, where you at least have a ten-day minimum paid vacation, we have no minimum whatsoever in the U.S., so about 25% of American workers receive no paid vacation at all.  In this year, it is expected that only 14% of American workers will take even one two-week block off this year, and only about 57% will even take one week off as a block. 

And that is even if they have more vacation through their contract with their employer or their union?

John deGraaf: That’s right.  The average American gets officially 14 days and uses about 11. But in many cases, more and more now, vacation is becoming the long weekend as people use those vacation days here and there, and basically use them to run errands.  Far fewer people are taking this block off and taking the summer break with their family and we see that as a serious health issue, family bonding issue and many other things.  So we are advocating a paid vacation law, and we would encourage that two of those weeks be taken as a block, but that is probably not feasible as part of the law, but that is something we would encourage people to do.  This would be at the start; after one year on the job you would receive 15 paid days off and that would be pro-rated for part-time workers.  So if you were only working 1 or 2 days a week you would receive 3 days off or 6 days off – or the pro-rated equivalent for 3 weeks.  I think even for Canadians, there is something in this, because your law at this point it is my understanding is that it is 10 days and it goes up to 15 after 5 years. 

It’s basically 10 days – of course this is a provincial jurisdiction – I was going to ask you about the jurisdictional question.  In Saskatchewan we have 15 days and we tend to be at the top in the country – most are at two weeks.

John deGraaf: In many things – it seems to be quite a progressive province in many ways, since the days of Tommy Douglas.

We do have some labour legislation that’s actually turned out to help both employers and employees in terms of retention issues and that kind of thing.  I want to ask you first of all, in the United States – vacation law – is that an area of the federal government or a state policy?

John deGraaf:  It can be either.  We certainly couldn’t have mandated federal law that says three weeks off.  It was originally going to be part of our Fair Labour Standards Act – there would have been at least a two-week vacation law back in 1938 when the Fair Labour Standards Act was passed.  There were three major planks that were supposed to be part of the Act; one of them being the minimum wage, the 2^nd being the 40-hour work week and the 3^rd being some kind of vacation, probably a two-week vacation, but the vacation part got dropped, we never passed the vacation law in this country.  It is also legal for states, or even in my understanding, municipalities, or counties, to pass paid vacation laws in the United States.  So our strategy for getting a law – we want a national law – but our strategy for getting it may be to look to certain states where initiatives in those states or even in counties could be more easily passed and provide evidence that that type of law could work and the sky isn’t going to fall and the economy isn’t going to collapse and therefore it can be applied on the federal level.  To my knowledge, and we’ve done some legal research on this, there is no law that prohibits any government body from enacting a vacation policy.

I think you pointed to, by referencing Canada, and the situation also in the United States; I would certainly say that having the law in place is very critical even though given the culture and the pressure on people, it means they may not take some of their vacation.  In Canada for example, it’s interesting that this program, The Work and Family Branch, every fall gets the media calling us – there are stories going out – 30% of Canadians are not taking vacation or only taking half of what they can take, and such.  Of course, again, that is very often the situation when people indeed have the vacation but given the long-hours work culture they don’t take them.  It’s interesting, with that I do point out that Canadians often hold back some days if they have young children and don’t have paid family leave – which is the case – we don’t have any legislation around paid family leave; we do, however, have some employers that provide paid family leave.

John deGraaf:  But you do have childbirth leave?

Yes, we have paid maternity and parental leave, but family responsibility leave covers illness of children or elders.  So what we find is that a lot of parents will save even one week of their vacation to handle sick children.

John deGraaf: Oh, I see, you don’t have a law regarding sick leave for children.

No, in seven jurisdictions we have a law that allows you to take some days and have job protection.  So you have the right to not be there, but you don’t necessarily get paid, that is the decision of the employer.  I think though that going after paid vacation breaks makes a lot of sense because it at least creates that bottom platform.  Canadians are working the long hours work culture and there are pressures that lead to people working longer and harder than the law would provide, but laws do create expectations also.

John deGraaf: I completely agree, and we honestly do believe that a policy is necessary and that just the idea that there would be a law, even if it were not always followed to the letter is still an impetus – that we as a culture believe this is important. 

I think that these days sometimes people say well, you know, regulations are not as important – but actually I see regulations as very critical because they are really a statement from the society that says something about the values of the society.

John deGraaf: They usually come after and they indicate that society has done something about something and has a point of view and it seems that it’s an essential point of view that we need this vacation time.  We are looking at this – not that vacation is the only, or necessarily even the most important time need that Americans have, but it seems to be a good one to, for a number of reasons, to focus our strategy on.  Because, number one, it’s quite simple to understand. There’s no complications – even with family leave in the United States, trying to get paid paternal and maternal leave, you get all this type of backlash from people – even from people who are not businesspeople, or wouldn’t have to pay anything for this at all; they sort of say, well, I’m not going to try to have a kid, why do you want to encourage the population to grow.  There’s a million things that people will say. 

And for sick days, which is another issue we have been working on, they will say things like, people will only abuse that, they won’t work even though they are not sick just because they can get those free days. So you get a lot of this sort of thing and plus, it’s how long….so this is a fairly simple one, it’s three weeks, everybody gets it, so there isn’t any favouritism to any group in society, so there is no way to abuse it because you just get it – you don’t have to be sick or anything like that. So it is simple, deceptively simple, because it is an illustration I think of our values to do this.  It says basically – what do we do with progress?  What do we do with productivity?  Do we just keep turning our increases in labour productivity into more and more stuff, and more and more paid services, or do we actually take some of these productivity increases and turn them into time for people to live their lives. 

We would argue that when we do that we will be doing things that are health-enhancing, family-enhancing, helpful in the sense of children, who are increasingly not getting out into the natural world, and experiencing the natural world and things of that sort, benefits across the board.  Plus, it is a social justice issue, because if you live in the United Sates, and you are poor you are far less likely to get any paid vacation time than if you are middle class or wealthy.

So a very strong case can be made, and certainly we at the Work and Family Branch, and I’m sure many Canadians wish you the very best with that. 

I’m wondering now John if you could tell us a bit about yourself and how you got involved with this movement.  I know you’ve been involved for some time, have provided very important leadership which I have watched from the sidelines for a number of years, and where you see this going perhaps in the next few years – let’s start with you…

John deGraaf: I personally have been interested in this issue for a very long time, ever since I was a college student in sociology in the late 1960’s in the U.S. and we were told that the big problem we would have so help solve as sociologists at the end of century was what to do with all of the leisure time we were going to have with these time saving devices.  That we’d be working 15-20 hours a week and have 7-10 weeks of vacation and I remember back then that I felt that this was a problem I could deal with and was the kind of problem I was looking forward to.  But the opposite is true, and we Americans are actually working longer hours today than we were in the 1970’s.  I got interested again in this issue the early 90’s when I made a national Public Television PBS film in the U.S. called “Running Out of Time” and followed with that with “Affluenza” about over-consuming as sort of an epidemic in the United States. 

I saw the two as connected – that the price were paying for our obsession with producing and consuming stuff was longer and longer working hours and less and less time to live our lives.  That came together in the a group called the ‘Simplicity Forum’ which is kind of a think tank, unofficial think tank for the voluntary simplicity movement in the U.S. and was looking for sort of a policy area to get involved in. 

That was when we came up with the idea of the ‘Take Back Your Time’ campaign.  It was actually a Canadian – Anders Hayden, who works in Toronto – who started the 32-hour movement in Canada.  He’s brilliant young sociologist, who actually suggested the October 24 date, the date is nine weeks before the end of the year.  Anders has been involved in the campaign in many ways and for a time was on our Board. 

We have been at this now for five years.  We have seen certainly a lot of media interest and public interest in what we are doing.  We don’t yet have a lot of policy success to show for it, and we certainly don’t have much of money to show for it.  We’re sort of a struggling organization in that regard, because we’re really are not on the radar screens of foundations and folks like that – so that’s been tough.

As for the future, for the foreseeable future, I think our focus is going to be the vacation campaign, because we know with our limited resources and people we do need to focus.

It is nice to hear you mention Anders Hayden.  I have known Anders for a while, and actually myself was a member of that four-day workweek network in the 90’s.  The Work and Family Branch had Anders do a presentation; we partnered with the Saskatchewan Environmental Society around his book, Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet.

John deGraaf:  Still one of my very favourite books.

Yes, an excellent book; I was talking to him recently at the conference in Washington – we are going to come back to that in a minute.  But I want to right now ask you about the following: I was reading the other day that Hillary Clinton has announced that she has a work and family balance plank.  I wonder – I know you have been travelling quite a bit, but do you know what she is talking about?

John deGraaf: Not exactly, but I do know Hillary has shown some strong interest in these issues, particularly the family issues like family leave and sick leave.  I haven’t yet heard from Hillary Clinton regarding vacations, but for example, last year I co-produced a film called the ‘the motherhood manifesto’ based on a book by the founder of “Move On” a very prominent political organization in the United States.  This is a film about policies that would help working mothers and working families around such things as: family leave and sick leave and child care and health care for children, and that sort of thing. 

Hillary Clinton, to my great pleasure, took that film and actually sent a copy to every member of the Senate with a personal letter from her, saying this is the kind of thing I think we need to be thinking about.  So she certainly, I think, very much gets these issues, gets the pressure families are under.  How far she’ll go, or how far other candidates – we’ve also had conversations with staff people of Senator Barak Obama, and also Senator Chris Dodd, who is also running for President – and I think those folks also very much get those issues – they really understand how important they are.  Within the United States, there is a great deal of fear about challenging the business agenda, especially when in our campaigns you have to raise so much money in order to be a candidate and so much of that money comes from businesses.  I don’t know what Hillary is going to do, but I think her heart is in the right place on that issue.  If she becomes the next President we will certainly be eager to work with her on these issues – or any of these candidates that might. 

I think there is very little chance that any of the Republican candidates will support these things in the least.  In fact they really go around trashing these ideas rather consistently.  Mitt Romney, for example, saying that if we do this kind of stuff we will become a 21^st century France and wouldn’t that be terrible.  We sort of say…it wouldn’t be so terrible – the French live longer than we do, they’re healthier and they have a whole lot of advantages. 

Alas, that is the attitude that the Republicans take, I think the Democrats are much more likely. Although we see this as a non-partisan issue absolutely, and there are Republicans who agree with us – but the leadership of the party isn’t there yet.  Whereas I think a lot of the leadership of the Democratic Party understands that we need to start moving in this direction.

Thank you on that.  I think that for those of us that have been working on the work-life movement, the work-family balance movement, the overworking movement, it is interesting to see that this issue get to the point where the language and topics start getting into major political campaigns, and we and we’ve started to see a bit of that in Canada.  I think it shows that the issues are really there, and secondly, that people like yourself, that have been working on these issues have certainly made an impact. 

John deGraaf: Let me make one quick point.  I’ve done some speaking in Canada, and I understand of course that there is always this sort of push in Canada – and I’m sure more by people on the business end of things – to want to use the United States as a model.  I always make the case that the United States is really not a model; it is not the model of a healthy, happy, sustainable economy or society.  The Europeans are doing a much better job in almost any indicator you can look at around these things, and they are not falling apart, in fact their economies are doing quite well, and Americans in increasing numbers are spending huge investments in the European economy and making money doing that.

Yes, I think in Canada we get a bit of a pull sometimes to the U.S. and then another voice looking at Western Europe.  I think though what I see happening, and I just spent some time in Eastern Canada working on these issues, is I think we are starting to develop a real Canadian way of going at these issues which I think is a pretty good balance between policy and what we would call cultural change around employers getting involved in a lot of voluntary participation in programs.  What’s going very well in Canada right now, of course, the dollar is doing very well, but secondly, we have labour force shortages.  So, what we are finding in Saskatchewan, is that for example, our Branch, we’re just overrun with work, because employers have been listening to our message and we actually have some very good employers in terms of being family-friendly in the province.  Now they are seeing, in real life, the connection between things like flexibility and family-friendly supervisors, work arrangement options and those kinds of things – with being able to retain employees – especially young employees.  So I think it is a fruitful time for these issues, and that brings me back, before we sign off here, to just go back to October 5^th and 6^th and 7^th, where John, you were chairing, and the lead organizer for a fascinating conference in Washington, and I had the pleasure of speaking on work family balance public policy in Saskatchewan and Canada. 

What struck me was the richness of the dialogue and the broad range of people and issues that came up.  I just wanted to ask if you could talk a little about this, because it is very formative in terms of where we need to take some of the discussion; and that is these linkages of the lack of time with environmental issues, with health issues, with health status issues, with the growing inequality that certainly you are grappling with in the U.S. but in fact in Canada we have a growing inequality.  We had new data coming out called the income gap so I just wondered if you could talk a little about these linkages, and the thoughts you had, and perhaps say a little about the conference, which I thought was a very interesting event.

John deGraaf: I think what drove the conference is our framing, which is the question: what’s the economy for anyway?  I think to ask that everywhere, not just the in U.S. and Canada, but everywhere, is an essential question.  Is the economy just about having the grossest domestic product and the highest Dow Jones or stock average, the biggest houses, and these kinds of things? 

Or is it, as an American leader of the early 20^th century, Gifford Pinchot, the first director of our U.S.  Forest Service, and actually a Republican governor of Pennsylvania, put it, “to provide for the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run.” 

When I look at that framing: the greatest good, the greatest number, the longest run, I see the greatest good as being about quality of life issues: health, life satisfaction, security, safety, how we treat children, these kind of things.

I see the greatest number about equity, fairness, mobility, the opportunity for those at the for those at the bottom to integrate themselves and share in the wealth of these modern industrial societies.

And I see the longest run as being about two forms of sustainability. Personal sustainability in that people have security in old age and security in things like health – health care and that they have pensions that will provide for them in old age, and that they come out of life debt-free basically and not saddled with immense debt. 

On the other hand, I think the greatest good is about economic sustainability and what kind of world we leave for future generations, what kind of society.  Here in particular we are not doing a very good job.  When we see the impact of global warming, seeing how it is even much worse than we had expected and when we see the impact, the ecological footprint of the United States, for example, using five times as much resources each year as we’ve got.  In other words, if the rest of the world were to adopt the U.S. and pretty much Canadian lifestyle – we’d need about 5 planets to make that possible – that’s not sustainability. 

So, if we say the economy is about “the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run” then we link and bring together these things and we can have that type of dialogue and that’s what we tried to do at the conference.

Yes, I think it was very successful and very fruitful in terms of perhaps of moving the debate.

John deGraaf: Thank you.  We appreciated you being there; we really appreciated your taking both the time and to come so far – from Saskatchewan, to be part of the dialogue.

Thank you John.

Visit Take Back Your Time at: http://www.timeday.org/

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14 SASKATCHEWAN EMPLOYERS SAY FAMILY-FRIENDLY PRACTICES KEEP EMPLOYEES

A new publication detailing how 14 Saskatchewan workplaces have successfully developed a range of initiatives to assist their employees in balancing work and family responsibilities is now available.

Saskatchewan Work & Family Balance Awards – 2005 Award Winners and Honour Roll Members, describes policies and programs that assist each of these Award-Winning workplaces recruit and retain staff. This publication showcases innovative and creative ways these small, medium, and large workplaces – in Yorkton, Prince Albert, Saskatoon, Regina, Melfort, Moose Jaw, North Battleford and Whitebear First Nation – have implemented practices to support their employees.  Award-Winners have indicated they would be pleased to speak with other employers about what they have done to make their workplaces more family-friendly. 

To view a copy of the publication click here, or for a print copy of the publication, contact the Work and Family Branch at 306-933-7983 or by email at wfb@lab.gov.sk.ca

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How well do work-family policies work for low-wage families in Saskatchewan? For more information, click here.

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Australian Election Issue – Labour Government would create Office of Work and Family 

Opposition leader Kevin Rudd said that work-family balance is a key election issue.  He said that four–years ago it was a barbeque stopper - now it is worse,  “These days families don’t even have enough time to have barbeques together.”  If elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, Labour, will establish an Office of Work and Family within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. 

A first step would be a comprehensive response to Australia’s childcare crisis for working families.  Federal labour would create 260 new childcare centres and create preschool places for all four year olds. 

The Office of the Work and Family will assess:

• The economic impact of policy proposals on family wellbeing;

• The impact of measures on work and family balance; and

• How proposals affect children’s health, development and federal wellbeing. 

For further information see: http://www.alp.org.au/media/0707/msfcsloo180.php  and

http://www.familypolicyroundtable.com.au/pdf/benchmarksFINAL.pdf 

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New parental-leave laws a hit with German Fathers 

Germany’s new fathers are taking paid parental leave at an increase from 3.5% last year to 8.5% this year.  The new parental-leave law provides parents with 67% of their salary for up to 12 months (14 months if at least two of those months are taken by the father). Germany currently has the lowest birth rate in Europe and many believe that this will only change when attitudes and policies become more family-friendly. The Institute for Business in Cologne thinks that this new law will both boost German birth rates and help get women back into the work force more quickly.   

See:  http://www.dw-world.de/popups/popup_printcontent/0,,2740146,00.html

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Participants Laud Saskatchewan Work-Family Balance and Labour Force Shortages Conference

According to participants at the recent Work-Family Balance & Labour Force Shortages Conference held at the Sheraton Cavalier jointly presented by the Balancing Work & Family Alliance and Work and Family Branch of Saskatchewan Labour, the conference was a success.  Participants noted how the discourse had matured over the last ten years in Saskatchewan on this critical issue.

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SK parents, take note of what you could receive for maternity/parental benefits if you lived in Quebec

Saskatchewan - Quebec: a brief comparison of income benefits offered during maternity/parental leave

Saskatchewan residents have been asking the Work and Family Branch how the income benefits they can obtain through Employment Insurance while on maternity/parental leave compare with the new maternity, paternity and parental leave/benefits program in Quebec. The following is a response to this question. Please note – the Work and Family Branch is not aware of ALL the details of the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan. This brief summary outlines information available on Quebec’s web site.  

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Family Responsibility Leave - All Canadian Jurisdictions

Click here to download a Canadian Jurisdictional Comparison of "Family Leave" provisions.

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Flexible Working – the Right to Request

A basic summary of the British law

Since April 2003, parents in Great Britain of children under six, or under 18 in the case of a child with a disability, have the right to apply to work flexibly if they have worked with their employer continuously for at least 26 weeks at the date of application.

Employers have a statutory duty to consider these applications seriously, but the law does not provide an automatic right to work flexibly. There will always be circumstances when the employer is unable to accommodate the employee’s desired work pattern; however, the employer is required to follow a specific procedure to ensure requests are considered seriously.

The right is designed to meet the needs of both parents and employers, especially small employers, and aims to facilitate discussion and encourage both the employee and the employer to consider flexible working patterns and to find a solution that suits them both.

Eligible employees will be able to request:

• a change to the hours they work

• a change to the times when they are required to work

• to work from home.

This covers working patterns such as annualized hours, compressed hours, flextime, homeworking, job-sharing, self-rostering, shift working, staggered hours, etc.

For further information, please see:

http://www.dti.gov.uk/employment/workandfamilies/flexible-working/index.html

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Right to request flexible work has not caused problems for most employers

The European experience suggests that employers have little to fear from employee rights to flexible work, according to a recent issue brief from the Center for WorkLife Law (based at University of California Hastings College of the Law).

New individual rights to reduced hours and flexible working in Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands have, in fact, helped employers establish new ways of doing things which benefit both employers and society.

This brief argues a legislative framework which recognizes both the individual and the business case can make an important contribution to creating a new organization of work which is both more balanced and more productive.

To read the entire issue brief, please see: http://www.uchastings.edu/site_files/WLL/european_issue_brief_printversion.pdf

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Want to present a skit or role play at a conference or meeting...professional scripts for 7-8 minutes skits are now available online

In Fall 2003, the Work and Family Unit was very pleased to partner with the Saskatoon Parent Education Committee, the Balancing Work and Family Alliance, the Saskatoon Credit Union, Child-Friendly Saskatoon, Family Service Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, Saskatoon Health Region, Saskatchewan Learning and the Saskatchewan Association for Community Living to present “Supper and Skits” at Mayfair United Church.

The Work and Family Unit is now making these skits available to the public. It is suggested these ‘family-friendly’ skits are useful as kick-offs for conferences/workshops. 

The Award.pdf

The Bus Stop.pdf

The Lunch Box.pdf

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