Family Friendly Workplace Policies
The Family Friendly Workplace
Berkeley CHEFS, the Center on Health, Economic and Family Security at UC Berkeley School of Law, recognizes the importance of inclusion of a wide range of family configurations in its research and policy recommendations. CHEFS understands that the definition of family may mean different or same gender adults living together, with or without children in the home, and includes households led by single parents, foster parents, grandparents, step parents, LGBT parents, as well as blended families and families with adult children, including the economically displaced or differently abled. Likewise, CHEFS will strive to be inclusive of such configurations in its examination of economic security, workplace flexibility, long term care and family leave issues.
Statement on Inclusion
CHEFS Projects
1. Improving Protections for Workers on Leave From Their Jobs
Faculty Research
Universal Insurance: Enhancing Economic Securty to Promote Opportunity, Jacob Hacker, Brookings, September 2006
A Defense of Paid Family Leave Gillian Lester, Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, vol 28
Let Employees Control Their Paid Time Off Stephen Sugarman, Knight-Ridder, 1999
Unemployment Insurance and Wealth Redistribution, Gillian Lester
Universal Risk Insurance, Jacob Hacker, Tobin Project, 2007
How Family Leave Laws Left Out Low-Income Workers, Ann O'Leary, Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, Volume 28, 2007
Impact of Leave Laws and Leave Policies on Employer and Worker Behavior
This study, led by CHEFS affiliated professor Catherine Albiston, has will examine patterns of discrimination against both mothers and workers who make use of leave provisions to determine what explains this discrimination and whether legal reforms can change normative judgments about leave time.
Unified Paid Leave/Universal Insurance
Currently, Congress is considering separate bills to mandate paid sick leave, provide paid family leave and reform the Unemployment Insurance system. This project would review the existing leave programs, develop a research agenda to study questions related to leave policies, and work to develop a more comprehensive leave policy to replace and expand upon existing leave programs. This project will be done in collaboration with Georgetown Law Center’s Workplace Flexibility 2010 project. This project will build on the work of Professors, Sugarman, Hacker and Lester. Professors Sugarman and Hacker have proposed policies to create more efficient, stable, and generous leave systems to build on or replace the myriad of programs and policies allowing workers to take leave in cases of unemployment, disability, maternity, caregiving, sickness, or vacation. Professor Gillian Lester has developed a paid family leave proposal and critiqued the expansion of unemployment insurance for such purposes.
This study, led by CHEFS affiliated professor Catherine Albiston, has will examine patterns of discrimination against both mothers and workers who make use of leave provisions to determine what explains this discrimination and whether legal reforms can change normative judgments about leave time.
2. Supporting Workers in Flexible and Secure Jobs Faculty Research
Careers and Contingency Gillian Lester, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Nov., 1998)
Good Government Workplace Flexibility Initiative
The federal government—both as the largest employer and the largest contracting agency in the United States—has the potential to serve as a model of family-friendly workplace practices, provide incentives to businesses to change their workplace policies, and create a tremendous ripple effect across the public and private sectors. The purpose of this initiative is to determine whether and how the federal government might leverage its power to promote flexible family friendly workplace policies and practices in businesses that contract with the government. Berkeley CHEFS proposes to research existing family-friendly policies and practices (or the lack of them) in the federal government and in businesses that contract with the government and to turn this research into concrete policy, regulatory or legislative proposals to improve flexible family-friendly policies and practices.
3. Work/Family Scholarship
Faculty Research
Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers, Mary Ann Mason and Eve Mason Ekman , 2007
Bargaining in the Shadow of Social Institutions, Catherine Albiston, Law and Society Review, March 2005
Institutional Perspectives on Law Work and Family, Catherine Albiston, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2007