Workforce and Family Program: Policy Papers

A Family-Based Social Contract

Next Social Contract — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:03:00 -0500

Executive Summary

Americans instinctively revere the family as an institution that helps facilitate all other aspects of life. The family fosters attachments across generations, provides a nurturing environment in which to raise children, and is a means of transmitting values from one generation to the next. It is the foundation upon which our social contract has been built.

10 New Ideas for Early Education in the NCLB Reauthorization

Education Policy — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 07:00:00 -0500

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) seeks to improve student learning and narrow academic achievement gaps that place low-income and minority students at a disadvantage relative to their affluent and white peers. Evidence shows that the roots of children’s academic success or failure are already firmly in place by third grade and as much as half of the black-white achievement gap already exists before children enter first grade. Therefore, to achieve its ambitious goals NCLB must do a much better job of catalyzing and supporting state and local efforts to improve children’s education in the preschool and early elementary years.

But despite the importance of the pre-k and early elementary school years, current debate over NCLB reauthorization has devoted very little attention to improving pre-k and early elementary school programs, separately or as an integrated collective. The main debate has been over the law’s testing and accountability provisions—which focus on student performance in grades three through eight.

Advocates for universal pre-k are lobbying for the creation of a new pre-k title in NCLB and substantial new federal funding to support state universal pre-k efforts. But there is almost no discussion of how provisions already in NCLB could better support high-quality early education in pre-k through grade three (PK-3).

Many provisions in NCLB affect early education. Four federal programs authorized under NCLB—Title I, Even Start, Early Reading First, and the Early Childhood Educator Professional Development Program—provide nearly half a billion dollars annually in funding for pre-k programs. Two-thirds of children in rapidly growing state pre-k programs attend classes in public schools, so policies that affect elementary schools also affect pre-k. Provisions throughout NCLB—from its teacher quality provisions to its charter school program—should be updated to reflect the increased inclusion of pre-k in public education, and to acknowledge the centrality of high-quality early education to achieving the law’s school improvement goals.

This issue brief analyzes NCLB programs and policies that affect or have the potential to affect early education and recommends 10 ways NCLB reauthorization can better support high-quality early education.

1) Allow Reading First funds to be used for pre-k language and literacy activities

2) Tap supplemental educational services and public school choice set-aside funds for high-quality pre-k

3) Improve accountability for early education programs

4) Restructure elementary schools identified for reconstitution as PK-3 Early Education Academies

5) Strengthen the ability of charter schools to deliver high-quality pre-k

6) Combine NCLB's Title V block grant program with Head Start's newly authorized state early childhood coordination initiative to create a single "2020 Early Education" state grant program

7) Require pre-k programs operated in public schools or with Title I funds to employ "highly qualified early educators" as lead teachers

8) Create a "Pathways to Pre-kindergarten Teaching" alternative certification demonstration program

9) Provide targeted professional development to individual teachers

10) Expand the representation of English Language Learners in pre-k programs

All of these ideas carry little or no cost to the federal government, relying on better use of existing funds rather than new funding. These are not the only ways to improve early education in NCLB, but they form a starting point for a broader discussion about how federal education policy can better support high-quality early education.

For the full paper, please see the attached PDF below.

The Stress of Balancing Work and Family

Workforce and Family — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 06:12:00 -0400

Executive Summary

American families confront major challenges in balancing work and family life. Workers report that they would prefer fewer hours, while new technological capabilities require parents to bring more job responsibilities home with them. Mothers and fathers encounter strain in work and home environments alike. Polling and surveillance data confirm that the balance between work and family care needs attention. Some of the most quantifiable and severe costs of this burden on families are adverse health outcomes. This paper catalogues a number of factors linked to job stress and work/family conflict: metabolic syndrome, hypertension, heart disease, poor dietary habits, obesity, and mental illness.

These chronic and systemic harms place a heavy burden -- financially, logistically, and psychologically -- on American middle-class families. Families are the fundamental building block of the next social contract; they raise the next generation of Americans. Only through sound policy solutions and broader workplace flexibility can America overcome the challenges that its families face.

For the complete paper, please see the attached PDF below.

Why Not More Focus on Children?

Workforce and Family — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 01:52:00 -0400

The 2008 presidential primary season is shaping up as one unprecedented in American history. Fund-raising reports from the first two quarters of 2007 demonstrate the breakneck pace with which this latest presidential season has begun. Fund-raisers aren’t alone in setting a new pace, as state after state has moved up the date of its Presidential primary in a bid for increased influence.

What has not changed is the focus of the early primary politicking. In the past few weeks, would-be presidential candidates have been forced to answer questions on the employment status of Don Imus, whether they hunt rabbits or squirrels, and the price of a gallon of milk. This focus on “gotcha” politics and commercial minutiae elbows aside room for discussion of more meaningful topics. The tragedy at Virginia Tech underscores the need for our nation to focus on our young people. What about the status of children in the United States?

To continue reading the Issue Brief, please click here.

No Worker Left Behind

Workforce and Family — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 07:00:00 -0400

Why aren’t Republican presidential candidates talking more about job training?

Wherever they go on the campaign trail, candidates are asked about off-shoring, layoffs, and wages. Despite the strong U.S. economy and near full employment, middle class anxiety is real.

Hardly a day goes by that some Democratic candidate doesn’t speak about the struggles of the middle class family in the age of globalization.
Democrats campaigned last November on responding to working family angst through a minimum wage increase. Republicans often respond that they would help at-risk workers through job skills, yet they lack specifics.

If they believe skills are the answer, it’s time for Republican candidates to offer bold new job skill plans.

Democrats smell blood on the issue of middle class economic anxiety. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, writes in his new book, “(Americans) are unsure of their footing in the economy.... They feel they are alone to navigate the contours of change and that government isn’t really helping them where they need it.”

For the complete issue brief, please see the attached PDF version below.

How Research on Family Structure and Children's Development Can Inform Healthy Marriage Practitioners in the Field

Workforce and Family — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:00:00 -0500

Is children’s development, and children’s cognitive development in particular, affected by the marital status of their parents? On the face of it, this seems to be a simple question to which there is an intuitively simple answer: yes. Yet the answer to this question is anything but simple. The complexity of this question, the policy context that has helped shape a growing body of related research, and the implications of findings for policy and practice are discussed below. The following discussion is based on my remarks during the plenary session of Connecting Marriage Research to Practice, a conference sponsored by The African American Healthy Marriage Initiative.

While we can readily observe that children in married-parent families tend to be significantly better off than children raised by single or cohabiting parents, it is more difficult to discern how much better off children without married parents would be if their parents were to marry. An extensive body of research on this topic suggests that marriage would confer benefits on these children, even those within disadvantaged families.

The research further suggests that the conduits for these benefits tend to be attributes commonly associated with marriage, such as improved economics and stronger family processes, more so than the marital choice itself. These findings help us understand why marriage matters and provide valuable insights for policy and practice within the Healthy Marriage Initiative.

For the complete issue brief, please see the attached PDF version below.

Grandparents Raising Their Grandchildren

Workforce and Family — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 17:23:00 -0400

Today nearly 5.7 million grandparents only have to walk downstairs or down the hall to celebrate Grandparents Day with their grandchildren. They are part of a growing segment of the American population that is living in multigenerational households.

With the increasing demands of a global society, Americans are looking outside the nuclear family and using extended family members to assist with household responsibilities. Grandparents are helping their children manage their hectic lives and alleviate some of the parenting burden.

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version below.

Valuing Fathers

Workforce and Family — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 15:00:00 -0400

Because of the demographic changes of the past generation, dads need more flexibility in their work. Businesses are recognizing that more fathers need flexibility in the workplace and many are giving it.

Businesses should be applauded for that and encouraged to do more in providing workplace flexibility -- and dads deserve credit for the work, balancing and the sacrifices that they make.

For the complete Issue Brief, please see the attached PDF below.

Honoring America's Entrepreneurial Culture

Workforce and Family — Wed, 10 May 2006 15:12:00 -0400

In his famous work on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that "Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of [America's] rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness." This observation, made in the mid- 1830s, is one with which few of those who comment on economics and American commerce today would disagree. The "boldness of enterprise" that Tocqueville referred to is entrepreneurship, the process of innovation, which, under conditions of risk and uncertainty, results in the creation of a new venture. Economists such as Joseph Schumpeter have argued that entrepreneurs are essential to the success of markets. The new enterprises they start grow to be the small and medium-sized businesses that are a driving force behind America’s economic progress and job growth....

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version.

Mexikota: The Plain States' Run for the Border

Workforce and Family — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

In the wake of terrorist threats, gas price spikes, hurricanes, and a run-up in housing prices in certain markets, there has been broad discussion recently about the value to the U.S. of encouraging greater development in the nation’s interior. Population growth along America’s coasts is crowding more people into ever smaller areas, while the interior of the country remains relatively open. As the U.S population is projected to grow to 400 million in the next half century, America has an incentive to encourage people on the coasts to settle inland. A policy to encourage migration to the Plains states would have a positive impact on the overcrowded coasts and bring needed human capital to the middle of the country. There have been many policy proposals (see Joel Kotkin, “Hinterland Ahoy!”, Wall Street Journal, 9/27/05) to encourage such movement. However, part of the challenge of encouraging migration might lie not in policy, but in the perception people have of these inland states.

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version.

More Attention Needs to be Paid to America's Workforce System

Workforce and Family — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Why isn’t more attention paid to the need for a public and private sector revolution in job training? In the past few years, there has been much attention paid to improving America’s education system. By tradition and even by law, education is a state and local responsibility. However, education has seen a critical change over the past five years in terms of the federal role. The Republican Party has transformed from calling for a decreased federal role in education (many in 1994 wanted to abolish the Department of Education) to being a party of a new increased federal role. President Bush campaigned successfully on education in 2000 calling for a standards-based approach. This campaign promise led to the No Child Left Behind Act, to substantial increases in federal expenditures on education, and to new calls for voucher programs to reform education from within the system.

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version below.

President Bush's FY2007 Budget

Workforce and Family — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 03:00:00 -0500

In early February, the President released his $2.8 trillion budget for FY2007. By and large, the budget did not focus on addressing the needs of families. Many of the proposed budget cuts and 141 program eliminations were in social, educational and health programs that benefit families. However, the President’s emphasis on research and development, investment in science and math education, and energy independence, were bold and welcome ideas. Moreover, the President’s proposal to establish Career Advancement Accounts, which could allow up to 800,000 people annually to pay for training or tuition costs to update their skills or develop new skills, is a good idea. This proposal is similar to the Personal Reemployment Account proposal the President made in 2003. However, this time the proposal is more preventative medicine than simply reactive action. One problem with our current workforce system of trade adjustment assistance and unemployment insurance is that its largely reactive—workers only have access to new funds for training if they lose their job or the factory shuts down. The Career Advancement Accounts would allow workers to upgrade their training or acquire new skills before they lose their jobs, or to allow them to change careers or gain skills to start their own business. This forward-looking idea is better suited for an economy where the average worker now changes jobs on average every five years.

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version below.

Economic Growth Finally Having its Effect on Family Wages

Workforce and Family — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 00:00:00 -0500

This week, the White House submitted its annual Economic Report of the President to Congress. It was a positive forecast driven by continuing strong consumer spending, business investment and export growth. Despite high energy prices and Hurricane Katrina, the White House had a lot of good news to trumpet on the economy from four years of largely uninterrupted economic growth.

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version.

Bipartisan Solutions to Work and Family Balance Challenges

Workforce and Family — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 12:00:00 -0500

America is the world's most entrepreneurial nation, giving tremendous opportunities to our own citizens andattracting business leaders from around the world wholocate in the United States to realize the benefits of our dynamic labor force. Yet as recent cover stories in Businessweek and Fortune magazines indicate, American workers increasingly feel stressed about trying to balance their work and family commitments, and value working arrangements that can help them find balance.

When Americans talk about "workplace flexibility," different ideas come to mind. Employees think about flexible jobs that allow them to be productive at work while allowing them time to meet their family and community obligations. Employers, on the other hand, think of the relatively low regulatory burden U.S. labor laws impose and of the productive flexibility of the workforce.

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF below.

Running Faster to Stay in Place

Workforce and Family — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Trying to make sense of the steady stream of economic news can be frustrating. Is the economy getting better or worse? The news seems to change weekly and, depending on what is measured, can seem bleak or sunny. Wages are stagnant but productivity is up. The unemployment rate declines but so does labor force participation.

We can't even begin to understand how America is faring economically unless we first establish how its families are doing -- how much they're earning and how many hours they must work to earn this income.

We have set out here to examine the number of hours worked by families and the link between wage growth and work hours in families of different incomes. In order to illuminate these trends, we present new data on the increase in hours worked by married-couple families and the contribution that wives’ income make to real income growth in these families. We put this recent period in the context of the post-War period and explore the implications of the data we present. Finally, we offer some directions for policy consideration.

The data we present here reveal that, for the period 1979-2000, married-couple families with children increased their hours worked by 16 percent, or almost 500 annual hours. Yet the data also demonstrate that without the increase in women’s work, middle-quintile families would have experienced an average real income increase of only 5 percent -- instead of the actual 24 percent -- while families in the bottom two quintiles would have experienced a decrease in real income over that period -- by about 14 percent for the bottom quintile and about 5 percent for the second quintile.

These data reveal that the economic engine for middle- and lower-income advancement is in low gear.

Remarkably, this is true even when productivity has grown at a healthy clip. These trends represent a departure from those of the post-War years when median family income doubled -- tracking productivity growth. Today, middle- and lower-income families no longer see increasing returns to their hours worked in the same way that the previous generation did. The only way many of these families can keep their total income growing -- or not shrinking -- is to work harder and harder.

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version.

Win-Win Flexibility -- A Policy Proposal

Workforce and Family — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Today fully 70 percent of families with children are headed by two working parents or by an unmarried working parent. The "traditional family" of the breadwinner and homemaker has been replaced by the "juggler family," in which no one is home fulltime. Two-parent families are working 10 more hours a week than in 1979.

To be decent parents, caregivers, and members of their communities, workers now need greater flexibility than they once did. Yet good part-time or flex-time jobs remain rare....

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version.

The Way We Work

Workforce and Family — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 00:00:00 -0500

In recent years, researchers, the media, and policymakers have struggled to examine the shifting dynamics of work and family and to better understand the implications of these changes for American life. Most experts can agree that American families have changed. We no longer fit the June and Ward Cleaver model. In 1960, 70 percent of American families with children had at least one parent home full-time. By 2000, this trend has been completely reversed. Today, nearly 70 percent of families are headed by either two working parents or a single working parent. The notion of a breadwinner and a wife may have defined the intersection of family and work in the past. But today’s realities demonstrate that for most families, this is no longer true.

Similarly, the nature of work in America has changed, with a 9-to-5 workday quickly becoming a relic of the past. Families are now struggling to integrate into a global economy that operates on a 24/7 schedule. Today men and women in America are working more than most other workers in the industrialized world. Nevertheless, the concept of the "ideal worker" -- someone available at all times, without family responsibilities --dominates today’s workplace culture, pulling moms and dads further into the workforce.

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version.

Helping America's Working Parents

Workforce and Family — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Across the industrialized countries, nearly five decades of steady growth in female employment has radically changed life for many parents and children. One of the most striking changes in Europe, Canada, and the United States has been the increase in employment among mothers with very young children. Nearly 85 percent of American mothers employed before childbearing now return to work before their child's first birthday. Rising women's employment -- among both single and coupled women -- is an encouraging trend from the perspective of women’s economic independence. It is consistent with the promotion, particularly in the U.S., of employment as an alternative to public assistance. But it is also raising a host of new and difficult concerns. Do the large majority of parents who are now working for pay have time for both parenting and employment? And who is caring for their children when parents are at the workplace?

For the complete Working Paper -- or a concise Issue Brief, please see the attached PDF versions.

America's Promise in A New Century

adminn — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

FROM: Karen Kornbluh
SUBJECT: America's Promise in A New Century
DATE: August 6, 2004

Americans are concerned as they have not been since 1992 about the future of their way of life in a global economy. They sense that their kids may be part of the first generation that does worse than its parents and they don't understand how this can be so when they are "working hard and playing by the rules."

President Bush has embraced the framework popularized by New America to explain changes in both the economy and the family. The diagnosis is right but, unfortunately, the prescription -- the Ownership Society agenda -- would make the patient worse. It would help only the dwindling number of those thriving in a global economy and increase economic insecurity for most families:

These are exciting times for our country. It's a time of amazing change. The economy is changing. The world is changing. In our parents' generation, moms usually stayed home while fathers worked for one company until retirement. The company provided health care, and training, and a pension. Many of the government programs and most basic systems, from health care to Social Security to the tax code were based, and still are based on those old assumptions.

This is a different world. Workers change jobs and careers frequently. Most of these jobs are created by small businesses. They can't afford to provide health care or pensions or training. Parents are working; they're not at home. We need to make sure government changes with the times, and to work for America's working families. You see, American workers need to own their own health care accounts. They need to own and manage their own pensions and retirement systems. They need more ownership so they can take the benefits from job to job. They need flex-time so they can work out of the home.

The right response to the changing family and economy is not to undermine the social contract further by asking families to "own" more of the risk inherent in the global economy, as the Ownership agenda proposes to do. Nor is it to appear to be patching the outdated social contract. It is to reform the social contract so it works to make families economically secure in the 21st Century economy.

The Narrative: Renewing America's Promise in A New Century

Over the last three decades, American workers became "global free agents," competing with workers around the world for wages and benefits, changing jobs every five years on average and, in one out of four cases, working in nonstandard (temp, part-time, free lance) jobs. So, earnings stagnated and health insurance and pension benefits shrank. At the same time, the costs of middle class life rose.

The result has been parents working more and more hours to pay the bills. The new "juggler parents" are stretched for time to care for kids and participate in community activities. A forthcoming Economic Policy Institute-New America paper reports that middle-class family income would have virtually held steady over the last 25 years if these families had not increased the number of hours they worked dramatically, in a radical departure from post-war trends. Families in the bottom two income quintiles would actually have fallen.

Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley explained in a recent NY Times op ed that global "wage arbitrage" is finally upon us and we must act. He is only half right. We face global wage and safety net arbitrage. Alan Greenspan sees clouds on the horizon. He testified in June that the jobs problem "can be and must be addressed, because I think that it's creating an increasing concentration of incomes in this country and, for a democratic society, that is not a very desirable thing to allow to happen."

A poll conducted by pollsters Bill McInturff and Anna Greenberg for the New America Foundation found likely voters feel kids aren't being properly cared because parents are working harder to make ends meet.

Americans are eager to embrace the many advantages -- flexibility, autonomy and potential for upside -- of the new century. However, antiquated policies undermine their ability to succeed. The goals of our education, social insurance and workplace policies, created to give our grandparents the tools to build economic security and opportunity, are as critical as ever. The policies should not be abandoned. They must be reformed for the new era.

The candidate who convinces them he understands their plight and is best able to lead them into a brighter future has a great advantage. In 1992, Bill Clinton put forward a comprehensive agenda to create high paying jobs in a global economy. Married women voted for Clinton in 1992. In 1996 he won the support of married women and men. Arnold Schwartzenegger used the struggles of working families to introduce himself to the voters of California. He proposed an after-school initiative to address the problem of latch-key kids.

The New Agenda for America's Families

Reforms are needed to restore America's promise and address the global wage and safety net arbitrage. The New Agenda would include a number of signature New America Foundation proposals as well as new ideas for redesigning the safety net for the 21st Century.

Redesigning the Safety Net

Citizen-based Health Insurance, subsidized so that no one pays more than a fixed percentage of income.
Progressive Retirement (USA) Accounts.
International forum on safeguarding the middle class in developed countries and growing the middle class in developing countries.
Parent Accounts. Tax-preferred, refundable accounts for parents to save for the costs of raising children OR adopt the Clark tax reform proposal to combine the various child tax credits.
Work-Life. Expand FMLA, work with business to create more flexible workplaces by creating a new award and work with small businesses on adopting best practices.

Growing Wages

Learning Society. Put new science and math teachers in our schools. Devise a blueprint for a New Learning Network of the highest quality learning, appropriate to the needs of local employment opportunities, in every community.
National Economic Opportunity Council (combining NEC and OSTP) focused on creating quality jobs in a global economy through innovation, investment and infrastructure.
Entrepreneurial Capitalism Bank. Replace SBA with a new bank to spur small business creation and innovation out of the disparate small business funding programs.

Why Dad Can't 'Have it All'

Workforce and Family — Sun, 20 Jun 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Father’s Day holds few surprises. A gift from the kids-usually a bad tie-and dinner with the family. Fatherhood itself, however, has undergone dramatic changes over the past few decades as Dads have taken on far more responsibility at home and, in many ways, changed the very definition of Father. The rest of the world has yet to catch up with the new Dad. As a result, even in 2004, too many fathers must still choose between being good breadwinners and good parents -- when they’d like to be both.

In 1960, Dads in 70 percent of all families with children could kiss the kids good-bye and leave for work knowing that Mom was home to answer any calls from the school nurse. Today, Dad’s work number is likely to be on the school emergency card -- as there’s no one home full-time in over 70 percent of all families. As working mothers have increased the number of hours they work -- by over 1/3, over the last two decades, according to the Economic Policy Institute -- Dad has been under ever more pressure to pick up the slack.

Dads have responded -- increasing the time they spend doing household chores by almost 45 minutes a day (while mothers have decreased their time by about the same amount), and spending twice as much time devoted to child care responsibilities as they did thirty years ago. The results tend to be positive. The more involved Dad is in family life, the better the kids. cognitive development, self control, self esteem, life skills and social competence -- and the less stereotyped attitudes they have about appropriate roles for men and women.

Michael Kimmel, a leading scholar of fatherhood, believes .the most dramatic shift in family life in the 21st century will surely be the changing roles of men, just as the demographic shift in the workplace in the 20th century was the dramatic entry of women..

But while dads seem willing to expand their role in family life, there’s a third party that has not been so quick to change: the workplace. Dad may want to spend more time with the kids, but his boss isn’t too eager to give him the flexibility he needs. Fathers are now working slightly more than they did in 1979. And the pressure on them to do all that is asked of them at work is on the rise. Offshoring is just one of the threats to a family’s economic security. Job tenure and benefit coverage are down. Wages have stagnated while fixed costs like housing and college are through the roof.

Dads can’t risk losing the family’s health care and pension benefits that are often tied to working a .full-time. schedule. Meanwhile, full-time jobs often lack access to parental leave or flexible work arrangements that would help them balance work and family. More than half of wage and salaried employees lack the ability to change their starting and quitting times, and a similar percentage lack the ability to work a compressed schedule. In fact,

Dads often face hostility by their employer for taking time off to meet the needs of children and family. In a study released this week by the Program on WorkLife Law at American University Washington College of Law, fathers were found to risk pay loss, disciplinary action, and even dismissal when they choose family responsibilities over work.

For dads, like moms, cash competes with care. Much has been written in the last few years about the financial sacrifice this often entails for Mom -- especially in the event of a divorce. But less has been said about the price that Dad and the kids pay when a demanding boss, or fear of a pink slip, trumps Dad’s ability to attend to a sick child or show up for a parent conference.

It is simply a myth that dads wouldn’t choose to .have it all. if given the option. A study by the Families and Work Institute shows that 70 percent of fathers reported feeling that they do not have enough time with their children. And when two federal agencies implemented flextime for their employees, half of the male employees with children changed their work hours in order to spend more time with their families.

Institutions need to change if men are to be allowed to succeed as fathers, both at work and at home. For a start, employers need to understand that their workforce has more family responsibilities than in the past and needs more flexibility. Family economic security -- in the form of health insurance and pension benefits -- can no longer be tied to working long hours. More supports -- like child care and after after school -- are required to help care for children while dads and moms are at work.

It’s not too late to return the tie.

This document is also available in PDF format.