Lessons from JetBlue

A solution may have been found for parents who want to work but also want to be at home with their children. Thomas Friedman discusses "homesourcing," a term he learned from David Neeleman, founder and CEO of JetBlue Airways, in his new book:

JetBlue now has four hundred reservation agents... working at home in the Salt Lake City area, taking reservations - in between babysitting, exercising, writing novels and cooking dinner...

Neelman has a personal reason for wanting to do this. He is a Mormon and believes that society will be better off if more mothers are able to stay at home with their young children but are given a chance to be wage-earners at the same time. So he based his home reservations system in Salt Lake City, where the vast majority of the women are Mormons and many are stay-at-home mothers. Home reservationists work twenty-five hours a week and have to come into the JetBlue regional office in Salt Lake City for four hours a month to learn new skills and be brought up to date on what is going on inside the company.

From Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century,p. 37.

This is a great suggestion for women who want to be stay-at-home moms, but who also want to earn a salary. However, there still need to be more converations in the workplace about women and men who want to have meaningful careers (which require them to work outside the home) but who also want to balance that with having and actively raising children.

Comments

[aliza]

Wow, yet another reason for me to love JetBlue! But what do the mothers do with the children while they are taking reservations? Do they have babysitters for the 25 hours a week they work? Do they sneak in a few hours' work while the children are napping? Or is the idea that this is for mothers of school age kids, and the mothers work while the kids are at school (considering that traditional Mormons are as family friendly as Orthodox Jews, it's likely there will usually be an infant or toddler in the house, however).

I'm curious how these issues are addressed. Kudos to JetBlue and family-friendly companies!