The joy of flex: employees shouldn't need an excuse to get flexible work schedules. Employers should need a reason not to give them.

• Author: Kornbluh, Karen
• Position: THE NEW PROGRESSIVISM

A generation or more ago, it would have been impossible to envision the life of the American worker as it is lived today. A flood of women into the workforce has fundamentally changed the face of employment, largely for the better. Families are better able to increase their household income, and companies have benefited from the ability to tap female talent. But at home, working Americans have a dwindling amount of time to spend with their families. The parent who was home in the afternoon when kids came back from school, or cared for family members--young or old--who fell ill, is now hard at work. A snow day now creates a parent's Hobson's choice: leave a child alone or call in sick and maybe risk losing your job.

The stress over how to strike a balance between work and family worries parents. A 2002 report by the Families and Work Institute found that 45 percent of employees say that work and family responsibilities interfere with each other, and 67 percent of working parents say they do not have enough time with their children. But it's not a problem limited to individual families--the work-family puzzle concerns their fellow Americans as well. Last year, pollsters Anna Greenberg and Bill McInturff found that more than three-quarters of likely voters feel it is difficult for parents to earn enough and still have time for their families; 84 percent agreed that children are shortchanged when their parents have to work long hours.

The failure of the workplace to make accommodations for working parents is one of the biggest unmet demands of American voters. Shrewdly, Republicans understand this, but they have used it in order to promote a solution that doesn't solve the problem. During last year's presidential campaign, George W. Bush made a direct appeal to working mothers, running an ad in the final weeks that featured a mother driving home from work and growing increasingly exasperated as the radio told her that John Kerry would raise her taxes. To these mothers, Bush offered so-called "comp-time," which he claimed would help them balance work and family responsibilities by letting them choose time off instead of overtime pay as compensation for extra hours worked. But under Bush's plan, workers who accrued comp-time wouldn't have the freedom to decide when they would use it. Employers could make workers redeem the time when it was convenient for them, not for the employees.

There are, however, strategies that do give parents a way to...