mind, flexible work arrangements tend to help workers harmonize their lives with their jobs, as well as mitigate negative personal and family outcomes that result from work–family conflict (Kelly et al. 2008).
There are essentially three broad types of flexible work arrangements. Move work arrangements include programs and practices that enable schedule variability, changes in starting and quitting times on a time-to-time basis, compression of workweeks, and opportunities to work at home, off-site, or at different worksites. Note that for these arrangements the amount of work remains the same, but the place or time at which the work is to be performed varies. In contrast, reduce work arrangements include programs and practices that enable workers to scale back work hours, to job share, to phase into retirement with reduced hours, or to work part of the year for a reduced amount of time. These options offer the prospect of temporarily limiting the amount of work to be performed. A third set of options can be considered pause work arrangements. These include programs and practices that enable workers to take temporary career breaks, sabbaticals, or paid or unpaid time for education or training to improve job skills. If employment opportunities are shifting in the new economy, we would anticipate that many of these move, reduce, and pause work opportunities would be available to workers. Are they?
Consider findings from one study of American companies, presented in Exhibit 2.3 (Sweet et al. 2014). Over half of the employers (54%) provided no flexible work arrangements to most or all employees. It is also evident that the availability of flexible work arrangements varies widely across sectors. Organizations in the manufacturing sector are the least likely to enable employees to move, reduce, or pause work, with 75% of organizations not offering any of these options to the majority of their workforce. In contrast, employers in the professional, scientific, and technical services sectors and in the accommodation and food services sectors are much more likely to offer access to flexible work arrangements (most commonly the option to move work in accordance with schedule flexibility). Among employers that offer flexible work arrangements, the most common approach is to enable workers to alter where or when they did their work (39%). Few employers provided most of their workers with the option to reduce work (15.8%) or pause work (16.1%).
Exhibit 2.3 Percentage of Companies Offering Flexible Work Options to Most or All of Their Employees: United States, 2009
Source: Adapted from Sweet, Besen, Pitt-Catsouphes, and Golden (2014).
The availability of flexible work arrangements also varies by the type of job being performed and by the type of worker performing that job. Ironically, the workers who often need flexibility the most—especially women—are the least likely to receive these options (Swanberg, Pitt-Catsouphes, and Drescher-Burke 2005). Office administrative assistants, for example, are usually expected to work standard 9-to-5 shifts and to be at their desks during the workday, every day, even if work is slack. The managers for whom they work, however, may have numerous options to make “I-deals” that might configure their schedules to meet their personal needs, to work at home, or to negotiate reduced work if they wish (Rousseau 2005). The unevenness in the allocation of these types of opportunities is a critical concern in reconciling work and family for workers in all segments of the economy.
In sum, the existing evidence shows that some types of flexibility are more prevalent than others, but the option to reduce work or to take a break from work is not commonly provided to workers. Why is the availability of flexible arrangements so limited? Some evidence suggests that these practices help bolster workplace performance, facilitate retention, enhance the job, and may even contribute to a company’s reputation (Arthur and Cook 2004, Richman et al. 2008). And if this is the case for all employers, then the limited implementation may simply reflect a structural or cultural lag that likely will be reconciled eventually. However, at present there is conflicting evidence about the extent to which different types of flexible work arrangements consistently result in positive “returns on investments” (Kelly et al. 2008). In the end, employers are the ones who decide whether to extend flexibility to employees, and they look for evidence that the benefits of doing so (increased productivity, decreased turnover) outweigh the costs. And decisions in organizations are not only made at the top, but also at the local level by individual managers, who vary in their personal beliefs on the impact of new ways of organizing work (Sweet, Pitt-Catsouphes, and James 2017). In the contemporary economy, in which managers find themselves under pressure to reduce labor costs, the case for truly flexible work arrangements must be based on evidence that it enhances the bottom line and does not complicate management demands (Hatton 2011, Thompson 2003). In the absence of clear evidence of this result, it should be expected that the availability of flexibility will remain limited and uneven across industry sectors and occupations. In this sense, the potential of the new economy to make possible new ways of working remains constrained by a much more traditional set of concerns that emerged in the old economy.
The End of Organized Labor?
Another possible indicator of an emerging new economy is shifting balances of power between collectivities of workers and their employers. As Exhibit 2.4 shows, the rise of the old economy was accompanied by a dramatic increase in union membership in the United States. At the middle of the twentieth century, roughly one in three American workers belonged to a union. In the latter part of the century, however, membership plummeted, and despite a short-lived increase in union membership in 2007 and 2008, by 2017, only 11% of workers belonged to unions. Overall, the decline of unionization in the private sector has been particularly sharp; less than 7% of private-sector workers belonged to unions in 2016. The one exception to the general pattern of decline has been in the public sector. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020), government sector unions remain vigorous and have even grown, representing almost 34% of government employees in 2018. But, as we discuss next, even in this sector the union movement is being challenged.
Exhibit 2.4 Percentage of American Workers Who Were Union Members: United States, 1930–2016
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
One reason for falling union membership is that a declining proportion of the workforce is employed in manufacturing, the sector in which unionization has traditionally been strongest. In addition, as American manufacturing employment has contracted, employers have become increasingly willing to close facilities or to relocate both within the United States and abroad, so that unionization in the manufacturing sector has declined. In some cases, employers have moved away from areas where unions are strong to those where they are not; consider the shift of automobile manufacturing away from the union stronghold of Detroit to nonunion states in the South. In other cases, efforts to unionize have been stymied by threats to close shop and by actual relocation. Free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have made it easier for companies to move across borders, largely because those agreements often do not contain strong protections for labor organizations (Luce 2014). The development of complex supply chains, with major producers being supplied by a network of smaller companies scattered across the globe, has also contributed to union decline. Not only are the supplier companies small and mobile (making them hard to organize), they are also less economically secure, which in turn discourages collective bargaining. Still, nonmanufacturing workers do join unions in many other countries (including Canada). And the decline of unionization in the United States has occurred not just in sectors exposed to capital mobility but also in sectors such as transportation and construction that cannot relocate. So, the real reason for declining unionization may be the failure of American unions to organize workers in the growth sectors of the new economy (Milkman 2006).
American unions have been criticized for their lack of emphasis on organizing new groups in the post–World War II era, but even when they try, unions often meet with failure. One hindrance they face
