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Measure Q The Berkeley Flexible Work Time Initiative 2014 City of Berkeley Advisory Initiative - Majority Approval Required Pass: 27347 / 78.79% Yes votes ...... 7363 / 21.21% No votes
See Also:
Index of all Measures |
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Results as of Dec 28 11:38am, 100.00% of Precincts Reporting (107/107) |
Information shown below: Arguments | Full Text | |||
Shall the People of the City of Berkeley advise the City Council to adopt an ordinance based on proposed federal legislation and the San Francisco Family Friendly Workplace Ordinance giving employees in Berkeley the right to request to work part-time, and send letters to the state and federal elected officials, requesting the state and federal governments to give government employees the right to have shorter work hours, if doing so would not cause operational problems?
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Nonpartisan Information City of Berkeley League of Women Voters
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Arguments For Measure Q | Arguments Against Measure Q | |
Flexible work options improve family life, increase employment, increase productivity, reduce employee turnover, and reduce environmental impacts.
This advisory initiative calls on city, state, and federal governments to pass laws that make it easier to choose flexible working arrangements, such as part-time work, telecommuting, and compressed work weeks. Under the proposed laws:
Flexibility is good for families. Our 40-hour work week dates back to a time when families were expected to have stay-at-home mothers. Today, most American families have no stay-at-home caregiver, and 90% of these families say they have trouble balancing work and family obligations. Flexibility is good for employment. Employers hire more people to backfill for those who choose shorter hours. Flexibility is good for the environment. People have the option of living more simply, choosing to have more time instead of more stuff. People who choose to work fewer hours usually consume less, reducing their impacts on the environment. Academic research has shown that shorter work hours reduce our ecological and carbon footprints. For more information, see http://www.flexibleworktime.com. For stronger families, more jobs, and a cleaner environment, vote Yes on Q, the Flexible Work Time Initiative. NOTE: The city's analysis only says this initiative promotes part-time work. Actually, the laws we ask the city to use as models promote many forms of flexibility, including flexibility in the times, locations, and number of hours worked.
Charles Siegel, author of The Politics of Simple Living
| No arguments against Measure Q were submitted.
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Full Text of Measure Q |
Section 1: Title
This initiative shall be known and may be cited as "The Berkeley Flexible Work Time Initiative of 2014." [Note: This may be changed depending on the title provided by the city attorney.] Section 2: Findings and Declarations
The people of Berkeley find and declare as follows: Section 3: Provisions
3.1: We advise the city of Berkeley to pass a right-to-request law that applies to employees in Berkeley. Section 4: Text of the Letter The city of Berkeley shall send the following letter to California's Governor, Senate and Assembly and to the United States' President, Senate, and House of Representatives: To <insert the name of the addressee> The voters of the city of Berkeley, California, have passed a ballot initiative that made the following findings: <insert the text of sections 2.1 through 2.4, without the section numbers > In light of these facts, we urge you to pass a law with the provisions of the Working Families Flexibility Act, first introduced in Congress in 2007 as S. 2419. This law gives employees the right to request flexible hours. It prevents employers from penalizing or discriminating against employees who request shorter hours, and it requires employers to respond to the request, but it does not impose any sanctions on employers who refuse the request. To avoid burdening small businesses, we recommend that small businesses should be exempted from this law. (We do not support another bill with the same name, H.R. 1406, the Working Families Flexibility Act introduced in the House of Representatives in 2013, which would not provide any right to request flexible hours or working conditions and which would deny employees with flexible schedules the right to time-and-a-half pay for overtime on weeks when they do work more than 40 hours.) We also urge you to adopt a policy giving government employees the right to request shorter hours, and to grant these requests when they would not create operational problems. We urge you to hire new employees to fill in for those who have cut their hours. This program could create large numbers of jobs for the small cost of rescheduling. <signed by the city of Berkeley> |