Fostering work-life balance for precarious workers : culture and social protection systems in comparative perspective

Abstract

In this report, we study how, since the 2008-2013 crisis, main Work Life Balance (WLB) polices, in interplay with social protection and labour market regulations can help precarious workers to combine work, family and personal life. We focus on access to Early Care and Education for children under 3 years of age (ECEC), paid leave, child and family benefits, the evolution of main gender gaps, and working-time autonomy. In line with EUROSHIP’s capabilities perspective, we discuss to what extent WLB realities and entitlements improve the opportunities to make meaningful choices for workers at the intersection of various dimensions of inequality (gender, class, migratory background, age). Our selected countries (Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom) present different welfare and employment systems. Nevertheless, despite their political, historical and economic differences –as detailed in the coming sections, most countries are making efforts to increase publicly funded ECEC, fathers-only paid leave, reducing the gender gaps, and facilitating parental flexible working-time arrangements. This has translated into important cross-country advances that include, though to different degrees, growths in female labour force participation, unequal and bumpy progresses in reducing gender occupational and salary gaps, access to ECEC, and a gaining weight of the dual earner model as a political reference. Besides, easier access to ECEC and means-tested child and family benefits, have improved the bottom line of protection for the most vulnerable children. However, when we pay attention to the situation of low-paid workers who are in and out of relative poverty, in most countries, with the probable exception of Norway, the last two decades’ advances in WLB are often overwhelmed by the deregulatory labour market trends that shape income inequalities. The most revelatory evidence of this situation is the increasing presence of dual-lowpaid-long-hours-earners households with narrow margins of choice.