DECODING THE NEW RULES
than 5,000,000 employees in all, were on one or another form offlextime, and the system was being used by 22,000 companies with an estimated 4,000,000 workers in France, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Great Britain. In Switzerland, 15 to 20 percent of all industrial firms had switched to the new system for all or part of their work force.
Multinational firms (a major force for cultural diffusion in today’s world) soon began exporting the system from Europe. Nestle and Lufthansa, for example, introduced it to their operations in the United States. By 1977, according to a report prepared for the American Management Association by Professor Stanley Nollen and consultant Virginia Martin, 13 percent of all U.S. companies were using flexible hours. Within a few years, they forecast, the number will reach 17 percent, representing more than 8,000,000 workers. Among the American firms trying out flextime systems are such giants as Scott Paper, Bank of California, General Motors, Bristol-Myers, and Equitable Life.
Some of the more moss-backed trade unions—preservers of the Second Wave status quo—have hesitated. But individual workers, by and large, see flextime as a liberating influence. Says the manager of one London-based insurance firm: “The young married women were absolutely rapturous about the change-over.” A Swiss survey found that fully 95 percent of affected workers approve. Thirty-five percent— men more than women—say they now spend more time with the family.
One Black mother working for a Boston bank was on the verge of being fired because—although a good worker in other respects—she was continually turning up late. Her poor attendance record reinforced racist stereotypes about the “unreliability” and “laziness” of Black workers. But when her office went on flextime she was no longerconsidered late. It turned out, reported sociologist Allen R. Cohen, “that she’d been late because she had to drop her son in a day-care center and could just never get to the office by starting time.”
Employers, for their part, report higher productivity, reduced absenteeism, and other benefits. There are, of course, problems, as with any innovation, but according to the AMA survey only 2 percent of the companies trying it have gone back to the old rigid time structure. One Lufthansa manager summed it up succinctly: “There’s no such thing now as a punctuality problem.”
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