Recent evidence suggests that employers and employees may benefit from work/family policies and that even non-beneficiaries may support such policies. The authors posit that these policies generate not only “use” values (values for those who rely on them), but also, based on a particular norm of social justice, “need” values (values received by all individuals, regardless of expectations of direct benefit). Combining the median voter model with the contingent valuation method, which was designed to measure the willingness-to-pay for environmental goods such as national parks, the authors capture the willingness-to-pay for seven distinct work/family policies within a sample of 343 public, elementary school teachers. The results suggest that referenda to initiate work/family policies in exchange for payroll deductions from teachers would pass, depending on the specific deduction. Even respondents with no expectation of direct benefit may place a positive value on the policies, consistent with the notion of “need” values.

See authors’ identification on page 38. How much time do schoolteachers devote to work? Although a variety of answers to this question exist, our expectations are that teachers would experience time pressures that would lead to a spillover of schoolwork into family life. Motivated by an interest in time pressures and how workers deal with such pressures, we draw upon the Time, Work and Family project. This project collected data using surveys, time diaries, and telephone interviews which were administered by the Institute for Survey and Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, during the 1997–98 school year. In the analysis presented below, we use time diary data for a sample of full-time, elementary school teachers in four, urban, public school districts in the United States. The first and most important task in determining time pressures placed on teachers is to generate an accurate estimate of how teachers spend their time. The accuracy of such estimates is critical to understanding how policies and practices both at work and at home function to alleviate or exacerbate such pressures. This article sheds light on the working time of teachers by comparing six estimates of working time, mainly focusing on work for the employer, but also considering work performed for the household because such tasks also require time and effort: