Paid Time Off MattersA (slow) progress report

Starting to read Beaten Down, Worked Up, by Steven Greenhouse

Beaten Down, Worked Up, the Past, Present and Future of American Labor is the just published book by Steven Greenhouse, former labor Journalist for the New York Times. Interestingly on pages 8, 9, he makes the same remarks as Melinda Gates about the lack of paid leave in the US, but the main difference is that he links this situation to the decline of the unionization, while (if I remember correctly) Melinda does not even mention the word union. She definitely sees the importance for women to 'organize' (mostly in far away countries) but not as workers unions (except in the case of sex workers in India?) but even then not as a right within a corporate environment. As for Steven, Microsoft is absent from his index... Different blindspots?

From Melinda's book:

Page 234 and following: Section titled "A workplace compatible with family life'

"We have to create a workplace that is compatible with family life. This requires support from the top, perhaps with a push from below."

"Perhaps with a push from below'? 

And how would this eventual "push from below" happen? who would take this initiative to get the attention of the omnipotent 'top'?

From The Big Squeeze, by Steven Greenhouse (2008)

 In his 2008 book The big squeeze, Steven Greenhouse devotes his chapter 7 to the situation of the "temps', temporary workers who very often are "permatemps", meaning they are not really temporary workers, just classified as such to be deprived of any benefit. Greenhouse mentions Microsoft several times. Here is the end of this chapter (page 134):

"Microsoft overhauled its policies as a result of the dispute. But even when Microsoft ordered its temp agencies to improve their health and vacation benefits and 401(k) offerings, the benefits they offered remained far worse than what Microsoft offered its regular employees".
Interestingly while detailing how permatemps were treated by Hewlett Packard's contractors in Boise, Greenhouse notices: "when Manpower was paying its permatemps $29 per hour, HP was paying Manpower more than $46 an hour for their services" (page 134).
So Manpower could have provided benefits and still make a sizable profit. What is the situation today at Microsoft? What mark up do the suppliers extract?