In March 2001 Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Education and Employment Secretary of State, David Blunkett launched the British Government's campaign to promote a better work-life balance. The campaign encouraged employers to introduce flexible working practices which enable their employees to achieve a better balance between work and the rest of their lives. The Working Day is no longer as rigid as it once was. The influence of new technologies allows for much greater flexibility and freedom. The result is that employers worldwide are beginning to realise that a flexible attitude towards working hours can make for solid results. The discussion in Jamaica has so far gotten bogged down around the issue of Sunday work. This is unfortunate because Flexitime is much more than that. We delay movement towards Flexitime to our peril. This is a real win-win situation for employer and employee, for work and home.

The Origins of Flexitime
Flexitime was developed in Germany and spread to the UK in the early 1970s. You agree to work at certain hours known as 'core time'. For example, 10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm. Outside of these hours you can arrange your starting and finishing times and your lunch hour as you please. You can also agree to work between a minimum and maximum number of hours each month. If you work up to the maximum hours, you can carry them over as time-off the following month. If you only work the minimum number of hours, you owe your employer for the next month. Here we will summarize some of the main options available via Flexitime.

1. Annual Hours

• Agree with your employer that you will work for a set number of hours over a year
  
• For example, a 37.5-hour week works out at 1,702.5 hours over the year
  
• You agree to work this number of hours altogether - in some weeks, you will work for 60 hours and some weeks only for 20
  
• Working annual hours can be a useful way of arranging work that has seasonal variations

2. Job-Sharing Schemes

• Pioneered by many UK authorities in early 1980s
  
• All the responsibilities of one job are split between two people
  
• Income, including benefits such as holiday pay and pension rights, is also divided between the two

3. Term-Time Working

• o Helps parents solve the problem of child-care during school holidays
  o Your employer agrees to give you unpaid leave during school holidays and, if you wish, to spread your payments out over the year to make sure you have a regular income

4. School-Hours Working

• Useful for parents
  
• It leaves them free to drop the children off in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon

5. Compressed Hours

• If you would rather work fewer days but don't want to lose out on pay
  
• You work more hours in the day in exchange for time off in the week

6. V-Time

• Developed in the United States and now available in the UK
  
• V-time (voluntary reduction in hours) means you and your employer agree that you will spend less time at work for a certain period (often a year)

7. Working From Home

• Some or all of the time - this is an ideal flexible option for some people
  
• 2 million people currently work in this way
  
• Working from home cuts out most or all of the commute to work
  
• In the UK, the national average of time spent travelling to and from work currently stands at an astonishing 7.5 weeks a year
  
• If you work from home you have to be sure that you do not end up actually working more hours than you would in the workplace

8. Teleworking

• A relatively recent variation on home-working
  
• You work from home and are dependent on a phone and a computer to do your job
  
• This is a new and rapidly expanding method of working
  
• There were as many as a quarter of a million home-based teleworkers in 1998 in the UK
  
• Americans who telecommute are as follows: 1990 - 3.6 Million, 1998 - 11 Million and 2002 - 15 Million.

Next week we will evaluate the various options and share with you the model that The JobBank team has adopted.