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Ever wonder how Americans are getting to work? In this short video, Andrew Beveridge, Co-Founder and CEO of census data mapping program Social Explorer, discusses the demographics of American commuting patterns for workers ages sixteen and above.

Using census survey data from the past five years, Social Explorer allows you to explore different categories of American demographics through time. Here, Beveridge walks viewers through the functionality of the “Transportation” category, revealing the hard truth of Americans’ car dependency, as well as the true scope of the bike-to-work trend gaining speed across college towns and urban areas. Want to see how your travel time stacks up to the rest of the population’s workers? Use the “Travel Time to Work” category to explore other American commuting trends, or explore the various additional categories and surveys Social Explorer has to offer.

Whether it is the speed, assumed efficiency and control, or the status-marker of the automobile that makes it so ubiquitous, the numbers don’t lie – for most Americans, “going green” may be only secondary to “catching green” (lights, that is).

Featured image credit: Charles O’Rear, 1941-, Photographer (NARA record: 3403717) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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By Maureen Duffy

What do we mean when talk about workplace health and well-being these days? How well are we doing in achieving it?

Traditionally, the notion of employee health and well-being was about protecting workers from hazards in the workplace and insuring physical safety. From this early focus on the physical safety and health of workers, the concept of workplace health evolved to include the protection and promotion of personal physical health and well-being. Corporate wellness programs emphasizing health promoting behaviors like smoking cessation, weight loss, exercise and nutrition, and management of chronic diseases like diabetes fall into this category.

More recently, the idea of employee health and well-being has evolved to include protection and promotion of the psychological safety of workers, the sustainability of the organization itself, and active participation in health promotion of the local community. The World Health Organization developed a definition of workplace health and well-being that includes all of these dimensions. Grounded in research, it defines a healthy workplace as: “one in which workers and managers collaborate to use a continual improvement process to protect and promote the health, safety and well-being of all workers and the sustainability of the workplace by considering the following, based on identified needs:

• health and safety concerns in the physical work environment;
• health, safety and well-being concerns in the psychosocial work environment, including organization of work and workplace culture;
• personal health resources in the workplace; and
• ways of participating in the community to improve the health of workers, their families and other members of the community.”

The World Health Organization’s is not the only definition of workplace health and well-being but it’s a good starting point for conversation.

“Who are clinical social workers?” ACSWA. Photo Courtesy of Maureen Duffy via iStockphoto.

Employee health and well-being, especially psychological and emotional health, could be faring a whole lot better than it is. To start with, the Gallup Organization, in its most recent worldwide survey of employee engagement found that only 29% of North American employees were engaged, and this low number represented the highest rate of engagement among all regions of the world surveyed. That leaves 70% of North American employees unmotivated and disconnected, to some degree or another, from their work and workplaces. Add to widespread lack of engagement the results of the 2014 Workplace Bullying Institute’s US workplace bullying survey indicating that 27% of Americans surveyed had personally experienced repeated mistreatment and abusive conduct at work and an additional 21% reported witnessing it. Especially from the perspective of psychological heath, well-being, and safety, the findings from these two recent surveys paint a gloomy picture and suggest that modern organizational life is in trouble.

A helpful way of improving psychological health, well-being, and safety in the workplace is through the implementation of guiding principles to make the organization more resistant to workplace bullying, mobbing, and abuse. These principles are values-driven, action-oriented, and structure-sensitive.

Guiding Principle #1: Place values like empathy, respect, and ethical communication at the center of organizational life.

• Empathy is the lens through which co-workers, customers and people served, and complex situations are viewed. What does this situation mean for this person or these people? What is it like to be this co-worker, this manager, this customer, this patient, this student, this teacher, in this situation, and what can this organization do to improve the experiences for each of them? Such deep empathy guides problem assessment and solution-building. The design and innovation company, IDEO is a wonderful example of a company that is built around the value of active empathy.
• Respect is the value that guides how we treat each other, acknowledge each other’s presence, and recognize each other’s contributions to fulfilling the organizational mission. Practicing respect also allows for embracing diversity and accepting differences. Some work futurists who want to embrace the power of diversity to push innovation and solution-building endorse moving away from consensus models toward dissensus models. In dissensus models, hidden, differing, or even critical perspectives about an organizational situation or challenge are actively sought and gathered. Dissensus models take outlier views into account, thereby including all viewpoints, thus avoiding some of the pitfalls of consensus-building and groupthink. While respect as a value is written into many organizational mission statements and codes of conduct, it is worth remembering what the cybernetician and organizational theorist, Stafford Beer, cautioned; namely, that a work system is what it does (not necessarily what it says it does). Whether respect is actually practiced as a value in an organization shows up in how people both talk about one another and act toward one another.
• Ethical communication brings together the values of empathy and respect and is the single most important way of aligning these values with behavior to reduce and prevent mobbing, bullying, and other forms of workplace abuse. Ethical communication offers a map for how to talk with others when they are present and how to talk about them when they are not. Ethical communication in the workplace excludes gossip, backstabbing, shunning and ostracizing, applying pejorative labels about the personalities or personal lives of others, and shutting people out of critical information loops necessary to do their jobs. Ethical communication includes transparency and openness among all organizational members irrespective of rank. The late Michael White, a renowned narrative therapist, adhered to a principle of ethical communication in conducting therapy that, if applied within organizations, would go a long way toward reducing workplace abuse, mobbing, and bullying. The principle that White rigorously adhered to was only talking about clients in their absence as he would in their presence—no matter who the third party was or how influential or powerful. Imagine how different and how much psychologically safer organizational life would be if everyone in the organization adopted Michael White’s principle of ethical communication!

Guiding Principle #2: Keep an action orientation toward the mission, tasks, goals, projects, and purpose of the organization.

In other words, this principle is about doing the work of the organization at full throttle every day. The work of the organization is not the perpetuation of the organization despite appearances to the contrary in a number of cases. The work of the organization is to provide goods and services that benefit and please end-users while inspiring those involved in their creation and production. Workers who are inspired, active, and involved are much more likely to work with each other rather than against each other as happens in workplace bullying, mobbing, and abuse.

Guiding Principle #3: Pay attention to structure sensitivity and how the organizational structure impacts the productivity of the organization and well-being of its personnel.

Suggesting that organizations pay attention to their own structures and modify or change them when they no longer seem to serve either the end-users or organizational members might seem like a tall order. But it’s a tall order that’s catching on. Zappos, an online shoe and clothing store with over 1,500 employees, is abandoning hierarchy, bosses, and management as we have come to know it in favor of a non-hierarchical, distributed system of power called Holacracy. Other companies are already using the Holacracy model and still others are utilizing structures that rely on networks and self-organizing systems rather than on bureaucracy and hierarchy. Traditional hierarchical organizational structures rely on outdated methods of control that are authoritarian in nature, even when benignly so, and emphasize obedience, conformity, and punishment. Caring for the psychological health and well-being of employees and, indeed all organizational members, may in the final analysis include serious attention to organizational structure and the possibility of structural change. Such structural sensitivity and change may also be required to rid our workplaces of bullying and mobbing and their destructive effects on the individual and the organization.

The news about organizational life and about emotional and psychological well-being within organizations is not good. Creating organizations that are more humane and that are inviting and exciting places to spend so much of our time is worth our biggest thinking and our willingness to dare to make them better.

Maureen Duffy is a consultant about workplace and school issues, including mobbing and bullying, a family therapist and educator and is the co-author of Overcoming Mobbing: A Recovery Guide for Workplace Aggression and Bullying and Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions. Read her previous blog posts.

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By John Cherrie

Each year there are 1,800 people killed on the roads in Britain, but over the same period there are around four times as many deaths from cancers that were caused by hazardous agents at work, and many more cases of occupational cancer where the person is cured. There are similar statistics on workplace cancer from most countries; this is a global problem.  Occupational cancer accounts for 5 percent of all cancer deaths in Britain, and around one in seven cases of lung cancer in men are attributable to asbestos, diesel engine exhaust, crystalline silica dust or one of 18 other carcinogens found in the workplace. All of these deaths could have been prevented, and in the future we can stop this unnecessary death toll if we take the right action now.

In 2009, I set out some simple steps to reduce occupational exposure to chemical carcinogens.  The basis was the recognition that the overwhelming majority of workplace cancers from dusts, gases and vapours are caused by exposure to just ten agents or work circumstances, such as welding and painting  (see chart). Focusing our efforts on this relatively short priority list could have a major impact.

Many of these exposures are associated with the construction industry. Almost all are generated as part of a process and are not being manufactured for industrial or consumer uses, e.g. diesel engine exhaust and the dust from construction materials that contain sand (crystalline silica).

The strategies to control exposure to these agents are well understood and so there is no need to invent new technological solutions for this problem. Use of containment, localized ventilation targeted at the source of exposure and other engineering methods can be used to reduce the exposures. If further control is needed then workers can wear personal protective devices, such as respirators, to filter out contaminants before they enter the body.

There are also robust regulations to ensure employers understand their obligations to employees, contractors and members of the public, both in Britain through the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health  (COSHH) Regulations and in the rest of Europe via the Carcinogens and Mutagens Directive.

We know that as time goes on, most exposures in the workplace are decreasing by between about 5% and 10% each year. This seems to be true for many dusts, fibres, gases and vapours, and it is a worldwide trend.  There is every reason to believe this is also true for the carcinogenic exposures we are discussing. This means that over a ten-year period the risk of future cancer deaths is may drop by about half.  If we could increase the rate of decrease in exposure to 20% per annum then after 10 years the risk of future disease should have decreased by about 90%.

However, during the five years since my article was published, very little has been done to improve controls for carcinogens at work. Recent evidence from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the regulator in Britain, shows widespread non-compliance at worksites where there is exposure to respirable crystalline silica. Most people are still unaware of the cancer risks associated with being a painter or a welder and so no effective controls are generally put in place. There have been no effective steps taken to reduce exposure to diesel engine exhaust, or most of the other “top ten” workplace carcinogens. What is the barrier preventing change?

In my opinion, the main issue is that we don’t perceive most of these agents or situations as likely to cause cancer.  For example, airborne dust on construction sites, which often contains crystalline silica and may contain other carcinogenic substances, is considered the norm. Diesel soot is ubiquitous in our cities and we all accept it even though it is categorized as a human carcinogen. In my paper I complained that there were ‘no steps taken to reduce the risk from diesel exhaust particulate emission for most exposed groups and no particular priority given to this by regulatory authorities.’ Nothing has changed in this respect. We need an agreed commitment from regulators, employers and workers to change for the better.  Perhaps we need to consider requiring traffic wardens to wear facemasks and encourage painters to work in safer healthier ways. At least we should take a fresh look at what can reasonably be done to protect people.

We know that since 2008 the number of road traffic deaths in the United Kingdom has decreased by about a third and downward time trend seems relentless.  Road traffic campaigners have envisaged a future of zero harm from motor vehicles. Similarly we know that the level of exposure to most workplace carcinogenic substances is decreasing. Can we not also consider a future world where we have eliminated occupational cancer or at least reduced the health consequences to a tiny fraction of today’s death toll? It will be a future that our children or their children will inhabit because of the long lag between exposure to the carcinogens and the development of the disease, but unless we act the danger is that we never see an end to the problem.

As a first step we need to have en effective campaign to raise awareness of the problem of workplace cancers and to start to change attitudes to the most pernicious workplace carcinogens.

John Cherrie is Research Director at the Institute of Occupational Medicine (IOM) in Edinburgh, UK, and Honorary Professor at the University of Aberdeen. He has been involved in several studies to estimate the health impact from carcinogens in the workplace. He is currently Principal Investigator for a study that will estimate the occupational cancer and chronic non-malignant respiratory disease burden in the constructions sector in Singapore. In 2014 he was awarded the Bedford Medal for outstanding contributions to the discipline of occupational hygiene. He is the author of the paper ‘Reducing occupational exposure to chemical carcinogens‘, which is published in the journal Occupational Medicine.

Occupational Medicine is an international peer-reviewed journal, providing vital information for the promotion of workplace health and safety. Topics covered include work-related injury and illness, accident and illness prevention, health promotion, occupational disease, health education, the establishment and implementation of health and safety standards, monitoring of the work environment, and the management of recognised hazards.

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Image credit: Graph provided by the author. Do not reproduce without permission.

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By John Knowles

If you become wealthier tomorrow, say through winning the lottery, would you spend more or less working than you do now? Standard economic models predict you would work less. In fact a substantial segment of American society has indeed become wealthier over the last 40 years — married men. The reason is that wives’ earnings now make a much larger contribution to household income than in the past.  However married men do not work less now on average than they did in the 1970s.  This is intriguing because it suggests there is something important missing in economic explanations of  the rise in labor supply of married women over the same period.

One possibility is that what we are seeing here are the aggregate effects of bargaining between spouses. This is plausible because there was a substantial narrowing of the male-female wage gap over the period. The ratio of women’s to men’s average wages; starting from about 0.57 in the 1964-1974 period, rose rapidly to 0.78 in the early 1990s.  Even if we smooth out the fluctuations, the graph shows an average ratio of 0.75 in the 1990s, compared to 0.57 in the early 1970s.

The closing of the male-female wage gap suggests a relative improvement in the economic status of non-married women compared to non-married men. According to bargaining models of the household, we should expect to see a better deal for wives—control over a larger share of household resources – because they don’t need marriage as much as they used to. We should see that the share of household wealth spent on the wife increases relative to that spent on the husband.

Bargaining models of household behavior are rare in macroeconomics. Instead, the standard assumption is that households behave as if they were maximizing a fixed utility function. Known as the “unitary” model of the household, a basic implication is that when a good A becomes more expensive relative to another good B, the ratio of A to B that the household consumes should decline.  When women’s wages rose relative to men’s, that increased the cost of wives’ leisure relative to that of husbands. The ratio of husbands’ leisure time to that of wives should therefore have increased.

In the bargaining model there is an additional potential effect on leisure: as the share of wealth the household spends on the wife increases, it should spend more on the wife’s leisure. Therefore the ratio of husband’s to wife’s leisure could increase or decrease, depending on the responsiveness of the bargaining solution to changes in the relative status of the spouses as singles.

To measure the change in relative leisure requires data on unpaid work, such as time spent on grocery shopping and chores around the house.  The American Time-Use Survey is an important source for 2003 and later, and there also exist precursor surveys that can be used  for some earlier years. The main limitation of these surveys is that they sample individuals, not couples, so one cannot measure the leisure ratio of individual households.  Instead measurement consists of the average leisure of wives compared to that of husbands. The paper also shows the results of controlling for age and education. Overall, the message is clear; the relative leisure of married couples was essentially the same in 2003 as in 1975, about 1.05.

One can explain the stability of the leisure ratio through bargaining; the wife gets a higher share of the marriage’s resources when her wage increases, and this offsets the rise in the price of her leisure.  This raises a set of essentially  quantitative questions: Suppose that marital bargaining really did determine labor supply how big are the mistakes one would make in predicting labor supply by using a model without bargaining?  To provide answers, I design a mathematical  model of marriage and bargaining to resemble as closely as possible the ‘representative agent’ of canonical macro models.  I use the model to measure the impact on labor supply of  the closing of the gender wage gap, as well as other shocks, such as improvements to home -production technology.

People in the model use their share of household’s resources to buy themselves leisure and private consumption.  They also allocate time to unpaid labor at home to produce a public consumption good that both spouses can enjoy together.  We can therefore calibrate the  model to exactly match the average time-allocation patterns observed in American time-use data. The calibrated model can then be used to compare the effects of the economic shocks in the bargaining and unitary models.

The results show that the rising of women’s wages can generate simultaneously the observed increase in married women’s paid work and the relative stability of that of the husbands. Bargaining is critical however; the unitary model, if calibrated to match the 1970s generates far too much of an increase in the wife’s paid labor, and far too large a decline in that of the men; in both cases, the prediction error is on the order of 2-3 weekly hours, about 10% of per-capita labor supply. In terms of aggregate labor, the error is much smaller because these sex-specific errors largely offset each other.

The bottom line therefore is that if, as is often the case, the research question does not require us to distinguish between the labor of different household or spouse types, then it may be reasonable to ignore bargaining between spouses.  However if we need to understand the allocation of time across men and women, then models with bargaining have a lot to contribute.

John Knowles is a professor of economics at the University of Southampton. He was born in the UK and schooled in Canada, Spain and the Bahamas. After completing his PhD at the University of Rochester (NY, USA) in 1998, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and returned to the UK in 2008. His current research focuses on using mathematical models to analyze trends in marriage and unmarried birth rates in the US and Europe. He is the author of the paper ‘Why are Married Men Working So Much? An Aggregate Analysis of Intra-Household Bargaining and Labour Supply’, published in The Review of Economics Studies.

The Review of Economic Studies aims to encourage research in theoretical and applied economics, especially by young economists. It is widely recognised as one of the core top-five economics journals, with a reputation for publishing path-breaking papers, and is essential reading for economists.

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By Sarah Damaske

October was National Work-Family Month and, while we have a ways to go to making work-family balance a reality for all, I also think that we have a lot to celebrate. Women’s portion of the labor force hit an all-time high in the last decade and it remains at historically high levels today. And women’s employment has helped to bolster families in these hard economic times.

One of the reasons that Sarah Jessica Parker movie, I Don’t Know How She Does It, didn’t make it at the box office is that the story is less relevant than it was ten years ago when the book came out. While women (and, increasingly, men) certainly feel the strains of balancing work and family, they are also much more likely to be “doing it” these days — nearly three quarters of mothers with children under 18 work today.

I recently conducted eighty interviews with women living in New York City to investigate how they made decisions about work and family and what I found may surprise you. Nearly half of the women I met worked steadily full-time through their 20s and 30s, prime child-bearing and rearing years (and the majority of these women also found time to have children). Another 16 percent worked part-time after having kids and another quarter wanted to find stable full-time work, but struggled to do so. Only ten percent of my sample left work immediately after having children.

Women who stayed employed full-time found work provided unexpected benefits for their families. Women are now gaining higher education rates than men, so while they were rarely paid as well as their spouses, women often were in jobs that had better social networks. I met teachers, administrators and secretaries who were married to firefighters, mechanics, and prison guards. These women explained that their jobs helped them gain access to opportunities, like internships and information about good colleges, that their husband’s jobs couldn’t give them.

Women who worked steadily also felt more financially secure than their peers and could provide for families when times got tough. One of my respondents explained to me that even the best laid plans could go awry — husbands could be fired or fall ill — and continued work guarded against the unexpected.

While women are working more, there remains considerable diversity in their work-family experiences. Those of us championing Work-Family Month should recognize that this diversity demands a range of policy recommendations. Better family leave and sick day policies, as well as increased workplace flexibility, would benefit the women who stayed employed full-time. An increase in the minimum wage and universal daycare would most benefit the low-income women who wanted to work full-time but struggled to remain employed. Workplace policies that allow job-sharing or temporary part-time employment would accommodate the needs of mothers and father with young children. And re-entry programs and a stronger safety net would benefit those mothers who want to remain at home while their children are young.

My respondent, Virginia, put it best: “We all work and strive, because everyone wants the best for their kids.” If we take her words to heart, we can find the political will to implement these policies that will benefit our nation’s children and their families.

Sarah Damaske is an assistant professor of Labor Studies & Employment Relations and Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University and author of For the Family? How Class and Gender Shape Women’s Work.

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By Mariko Lin Chang

This year’s Equal Pay Day falls on April 12, marking how far into 2011 the average woman must work in order to earn what the average man had by the end of 2010. In the 15 years since Equal Pay Day was established, the gender wage gap has barely budged, moving from 74 percent in 1996 to 77 percent in 2010. This amounts to a three-cent increase in women’s wages for every dollar earned by men. Given that women make up half of the workforce, the gender wage gap does not generate the outrage that it should, as is clear from the failure of the Paycheck Fairness Act last November.

Polls confirm that most people believe women and men doing the same job should receive the same pay. But many are unaware of the extent of the problem, believe the wage gap is a result of women’s choices or think that the gap is a relic of the past. Thus, Equal Pay Day is the perfect time for some myth busting.

Myth #1: The wage gap is a result of women’s choices.

We’re less likely to think the wage gap is a problem if we believe it stems from women’s individual choices—to choose one job or field of study over another, to “opt out” of the workforce to raise children, or to fail to negotiate for higher pay. These arguments, prevalent in the media, overlook important research to the contrary. For one, men are perceived as more accomplished than women even when they have the same resumes. As for women “opting out” to become mothers, author Pamela Stone shows [PDF] that many professional women who leave their jobs to engage in full-time caregiving are not “opting out” but are “pushed out”: They are stigmatized and their attempts to stay on the career track are stymied. Correspondingly, Stanford sociologist Shelley Correll found that mothers are less likely to be hired and are offered lower salaries than fathers and women without children.

Furthermore, while it’s true that men are more likely to be working in higher-paid fields, women make less money than men even when they occupy the same jobs. Researchers at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that in the largest 108 occupations, men outearn women in all but four: (1) life, physical, and social science technicians, (2) bakers, (3) teacher assistants and (4) dining room and cafeteria attendants and bartender helpers. With respect to negotiation, researchers at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon have demonstrated that although women are less likely to negotiate, they are penalized more heavily than men when they negotiate.

Myth #2: The wage gap is a relic of the past.

Concerns about equal pay may have been mitigated by recent reports that in major cities,

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By Lana Goldsmith, Intern

Scott Shane is the A. Malachi Mixon III Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University.  In this post, Shane deliberates the pros and cons of genetic testing in the workplace.  This is an adaptation from his new book Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders: How Your Genes Affect Your Work Life which shows how a heightened awareness of your own – and your colleagues’ – genetic predispositions can make you a better employee or employer.

Our genes impact numerous aspects of our work lives, from our tendency to start businesses to our job satisfaction to our leadership abilities to our decision-making styles. While we aren’t yet at the point where companies can use genetic information diagnostically, we might be in the near future.

Some observers have pointed out that as knowledge of how our genes affect our behavior in the workplace grows, companies might benefit from using this information. That raises the question: Should companies be allowed to use genetic information in the workplace?

Many, it seems, have come down against this prospect. In the United Kingdom, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics concluded in a 2002 report entitled Genetics and Human Behavior, “Employees should be selected and promoted on the basis of their ability to meet the requirements of the job. . . . Employers should not demand that an individual take a genetic test for a behavioral trait as a condition of employment.” (p. 183.) And, according to an April 24, 2004 article in the Wall Street Journal, Jane Zhang and Shirley Wang report that, in the recent genetic nondiscrimination bill, Congress made it illegal to use genetic information “to make hiring, firing, and other job placement decisions.” (p. A11).

Like many things dealt with definitively, there is another part of the story, which makes the issue less simple than it appears at first glance. Congress in the United States and the Nuffield Council in the United Kingdom clearly addressed one side of the issue: companies should not be allowed to hire people on the basis of something that they have no control over and can’t really change, because doing so would be inherently unfair.

On the other hand, how “fair” are other selection criteria relative to genetic testing? Numerous studies have shown the bias that people involved in the employment process have for physically attractive job candidates of the opposite sex. But appearance is, in large part, outside of one’s control, and is hard to change. So how is it fair to allow managers to make employment decisions on the basis of physical appearance, but bar them from using selection tools that incorporate genetic information?

What about the issue of fairness that comes up if we do not allow companies to use genetic data to assign people to jobs or training? If employers aren’t permitted to use hereditary information in this way, and they subsequently punish people for poor performance on the job, then we are implicitly allowing the companies to engage in genetic discrimination.

To see what I mean, take the example of a company which provides its employees with financial rewards if they take courses to develop their leadership skills, as Stephen Robbins and Tim Judge’s best selling textbook, Organizational Behavior (13th edition, Prentice Hall, 2009) reports a number of companies do. A sizeable portion of the difference between people in the ability to direct others comes from their DNA. This means that some people are genetically inclined to do better than others in leadership develop

By Edward Zelinsky

The swine flu is back. Gerald Ford was president the last time Americans confronted the swine flu. In response to the current emergence of this disease, public health authorities advise us to take precautions including the avoidance of crowds and of unnecessary travel. For many Americans, the most significant exposure to the danger of communicable disease occurs at the workplace.

While this workplace-based exposure cannot be eliminated, it can be minimized. To combat swine flu, we should encourage employees to telecommute from their homes rather than travel to their employers’ offices with their attendant danger of communicable disease.

Modern technologies – the internet, email, cell phones, electronic data bases – enable many employees to work from their homes for at least part of the week. Telecommuting extends job opportunities to individuals for whom traditional commuting is difficult, for example, the disabled, parents of small children, persons who live far from major employment centers. Telecommuting is also good for the environment, reducing the carbon footprints of employees who spend some of their work days at home and need not physically commute to work on those days.

Now, telecommuting can achieve yet another important benefit by reducing individuals’ potential exposure to swine flu on the days they work at home rather than travel to their employers’ offices.

A major impediment to telecommuting is New York State’s extraterritorial taxation of nonresidents’ incomes. When a nonresident works at home for a New York employer, New York imposes income tax on the telecommuting nonresident for this out-of-state day even though the nonresident never sets foot in New York on that day and even though New York provides no public services to the nonresident telecommuter on his day working at his out-of-state home. The result of New York’s extraterritorial taxation is typically double income taxation of the nonresident for telecommuting from outside the Empire State, a classic confirmation that no good deed goes unpunished.

I am something of a poster boy for the irrationality of New York’s extraterritorial taxation of nonresident telecommuters. I am a law professor in Manhattan at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. I live in New Haven, Connecticut. When New York sought to impose its income tax on me for the days I wrote and researched at home in Connecticut, I challenged this extraterritorial tax on constitutional grounds. Virtually all independent legal commentators concluded that this challenge should have prevailed since the Due Process and Commerce Clauses of the U.S. Constitution prevent the states from taxing activity which occurs outside their respective borders.

Nevertheless, despite these constitutional principles, New York’s courts held that New York can tax me (and other telecommuters) on days worked at home outside the Empire State. New York’s Court of Appeals, that state’s highest court, specifically approved New York’s tax-based discouragement of nonresidents’ telecommuting from their out-of-state homes.

Enter the swine flu.

For the duration of swine flu problem, New York should encourage telecommuting or at least not impede it. In particular, New York Governor David Paterson should announce that, to stimulate telecommuting to combat potential exposure to the new swine flu, New York will suspend its extraterritorial income taxation of nonresidents for all days such nonresidents work at their out-of-state homes.

In any event, Congress should pass the Telecommuter Tax Fairness Act which, if enacted into law, would prevent states from taxing telecommuting nonresidents on the days they work at their out-of-state homes.

And who knows? After the swine flu danger is over, Governor Paterson and New York’s other policymakers may discover the long-term benefits to New York of reforming permanently New York’s extraterritorial (and unconstitutional) taxation of telecommuters like me.

By Kirsty OUP-UK

With Oscar season in full swing it seems fitting that this month’s Very Short Introduction column comes from Patricia Aufderheide, author of Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. Patricia is a professor in the School of Communication at American University, Washington DC, and in the past has served as a Sundance Film Festival juror and as a board member of the Independent Television Service. Regular OUPblog readers will also have read Patricia’s previous posts for OUPblog here, here and here.

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Pat Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication at American University and is the author of Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction. In the post below Aufderheide reports back from Sundance.

Whew! It’s finally over, the longest 10 days of the year. The Sundance Film Festival awards have been announced, and all 50,000 of us festival-goers have cleaned up our condos, slipped on our Uggs for what we hope is the last time this season, and begun to make sense of the blizzard of business cards we’ve collected.

I want my I Survived Sundance T-shirt. (more…)

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Award season is upon. The parade of Golden Globes, Oscars etc… will soon begin and the internet will be drowning in commentary. Yet, these awards are all a bit different then they used to be. Documentary film is now in the spotlight and Patricia Aufderheide, author of Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction is here to help us identify which films to watch for, whether you are on your way to Sundance (which begins next week) or lining up your queue at Netflicks.

The word “documentary” used to be a synonym for dreary. It was what happened to you in grade school when they finished the curriculum but not the school year. Public relations people called it the “d-word.” At film festivals, documentarians were the flannel shirts in a sea of Spandex. Film critics were asked, “Did you see the movies, or just the documentaries?” (more…)

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