work disincentives Archives - The Pursuit of Happiness

Irregular Work Schedules While Raising Kids: Can Congress Pass a Law to Help?

January 10, 2017

Does Congress need to schedule your time off? A proposed law aims to address the downsides of irregular work schedules, and is receiving support from a surprising group of voters.

A recent focus group organized by the Institute for Family Studies was asked to look at ways for government to make it easier for working parents to succeed. This particular focus group, based in a small town in southern Ohio, was composed of 10 white, working-class Millennials who mostly expressed support for President-elect Donald Trump.

Like every adult-age youngest generation before it, Millennials are the favorite target of older generations who like to tell them they don’t understand how the world works. But this focus group may be on to something. It has been coping with the way the world works for a while now, and has a diverse set of viewpoints despite their demographic similarities.

Their recent free-wheeling discussion suggests that while they backed the conservative presidential candidate, they are willing to explore a liberal lawmaker’s solution to problems they face. Gasp, could bipartisanship come back in vogue?

The group’s post-election conversation hit such heady topics as paid parental leave, payroll taxes, marriage penalties in public assistance programs, and other issues that tend to divide policy agendas in Washington. A common theme that emerged was that they are willing to work hard, and in exchange they want economic independence couched in fair treatment from employers and government.

The conversation spilled into the minimum wage debate , but a couple issues that struck a chord came down to adequate scheduling of work hours and promoting a “success sequence” for young people (finish school, get a job, get married, have children, in that order). The success sequence may be popular, albeit difficult to implement, but a proposed bill in Congress already captures what the Millennials said about adequate scheduling — they want the ability to plan their day-to-day lives.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 10 percent of workers report that they have irregular schedules, which makes it harder for them to do typical activities like planning to attend functions at their kids’ schools or, as one couple in the focus group shared, scheduling their wedding. Another 7 percent of workers interviewed in the EPI study said they split or rotate shifts.

EPI reported that full-time employees in the retail and food service industries tend to have the most irregular shifts, but so do a significant proportion of workers in entertainment, repairs, transportation, and agricultural sectors.

What is concerning with the irregularity in scheduling, which inordinately hits lower income households, is the impact it has on the family. In essence, irregular schedules contribute to instability at home. For EPI, some of the solutions include implementing laws enabling workers the right to request changes and longer advance notice of what their schedules would be.

One bill on the table in Congress comes from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. It would do just what EPI supports. The legislation, called “The Schedules That Work Act,” would give workers in service industries the right to request changes to their schedules without fear of retaliation and would require employers to distribute schedules two weeks in advance.

It’s seems counter-intuitive that more law gives people greater freedom, but it has been done before. You’d be surprised what these Trump supporters in southern Ohio said about the idea.

Read the focus group’s response “The Schedules That Work Act.”

Getting Back to Work: Not Merely Happiness, But Human Fulfillment

July 25, 2016

Work is often unpleasant in our fallen world. But it contains within it the seeds of its own redemption, and ours. It often fails to make us happy, but happiness is a fleeting emotion. Work gives us something more lasting and sturdy than happiness: fulfillment.

Thus begins a manifesto called “Getting Back to Work” by economist Michael Strain on how the U.S. federal government can help workers succeed and achieve self-actualization. The essay is part of the “Room to Grow” series by the Conservative Reform Network, which began in 2014 with the goal of developing innovative solutions to challenges facing the U.S., challenges largely created by an overindulgence among politicians to engineer social outcomes.

Strain, who studies labor force participation rates and work incentives, argues that public policy does play a role in job creation by enabling a vibrant job market. He acknowledges that a safety net is critical to ensuring that those on the bottom rung of the economic ladder have a support system. But he also notes that the support system has made it harder for people to get off that first rung.

He starts with a somewhat poetic look at the roots of man’s love and need for work before discussing how public policy has gone down the path of diminishing the value of labor.

(M)illions of people doing their particular jobs a little bit better than anyone else can create enormous wealth and, more important, improve the opportunity for individuals to lead truly flourishing lives. Work helps us to flourish by allowing us to provide for our children. (Not all of this work, of course, is paid.) And work is a cure for boredom, one of the worst parts of modern, comfortable life.

Work creates community, something all humans need for flourishing lives. Members of your work community often become lifelong friends. Work educates our passions, directing them to productive ends, emancipating us from them. Work allows us to express ourselves, and in its proper understanding is deeply spiritual: In the Abrahamic faiths, the Supreme Being works, creating the world out of nothing. Saint John Paul writes that we are ‘called to work,’ arguing that we find ‘in the very first pages of the Book of Genesis’ the ‘conviction that work is a fundamental dimension of human existence
on earth.'”

Strain also suggests multiple solutions:

Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, a federal earnings subsidy for low-income households, to homes without children.

Expand Work-Based Learning Programs that include apprenticeships and retraining worker who have been displaced by technology or globalization.

Modify the safety net so that it better encourages work and doesn’t define disability as a a binary state rather than a continuum.

A person may be disabled in the sense that he can’t stock shelves, but not disabled in the sense that he can’t sit behind a desk for 25 hours per week.”

Other suggestions from Strain include cutting payroll taxes as well as commute times, making it easier for former prisoners to find jobs, and reducing occupational licensing rules. Strain also breaks through some myths about barriers to work, and points out polling that demonstrates the benefits of his positions.

In all, bringing back the sense of American pride is one key to getting people back into the labor force. Included in this, according to Strain, is the effort to recover “a culture wherein more Americans feel an obligation to build a career, even from a low starting point,” a position that has been hampered by politicians creating policies that are intended to ease the burden of job loss but have resulted in building barriers that make it harder for people to return to the workforce.

Read more from Michael Strain’s report on Getting Back to Work.