| ESRC
RESEARCH GROUP ON CARE, VALUES AND THE FUTURE OF WELFARE
University of Leeds
Workshop
Paper No 25
Prepared for Workshop Six
Cross National Perspectives and Issues
Friday 16 June 2000
Simon Duncan
POLICY DISCOURSES ON 'RECONCILING WORK
AND LIFE' IN THE EU
1. Introduction: the 'noisy' Atlantacist discourse versus
the primacy of the 'quiet EU Way'
The aim of the paper is to outline EU policy discourse on
'the reconciliation of work and family life' as part of our
understanding of changes in parenting and partnering.
This is, I think, much more important than we realise. What
has struck me rather forcibly is that, while the Blair government
is noisy with 'Atlantacist' policy talk and action using the
US model as inspiration, as with Welfare to Work (see Alan's
previous papers), at the same time - but much more quietly
- the UK government is having to implement (because it is
subject to EU legislation and law) a corporatist 'social partner'
model. This 'quiet' EU model has been increasingly gendered
through equal opportunity issues and, latterly, with a weak
version of the Swedish gender equality model which goes beyond
equal opportunities towards a redistribution of work between
men and women. Recent examples are the introduction of parental
leave (unpaid in UK, but how long can this last?) and the
whole raft of European inspired actions granting part-time
workers greater employment rights.
These
two trends are somewhat contradictory both in terms of discourse
and policy. In brief, the US / Atlantacist / liberal model
sees individuals acting in the efficient free market. Failures
are 'supply -side' (individual) due to a lack of individual
human capital or, if the 'opportunities for all' (cf Gordon
Brown) in gaining this are not being taken up (Equal Opportunities
is seen as one means of extending this opportunity), some
sort of individual moral failure. Welfare to Work and the
New Deal for Lone Parents in particular are good examples
of the policy outcome to this. Flexible labour, meaning flexible
for capital and including a low cost element, is central to
economic success in the face of globalisation. Continued gender
inequality is a crucial issue here because so much of Britain's
attempt at 'social dumping' (unfair competition using low
cost labour in EU terms) is through the use of low-waged and
low-rights part-time female labour. The 'parenting deficit'
is also seen as one part of this essentially moral failure
of individuals, despite the policy contradictions of seeing
paid work as a moral duty while demoting unpaid caring work
But the EU model, in contrast, sees corporate 'social partners'
(labour and capital) bargaining in a regulated market . Failures
are seen in terms of the relationships between partners which
need to be addressed structurally, eg in achieving a work-life
balance both to achieve economic success (ensuring a supply
of flexible labour) and to address demographic problems (the
'demographic time bomb', the 'parenting deficit'). Equal Opportunities
as one part of the 'Social Dialogue' (and the emergent and
wider focussed 'Civil Dialogue') is a way of gendering this
bargaining. The recent phase of mainstreaming gender equality
might even be seen as going further in seeing men and women
as putative social partners. There is also a recent input
from 'new social movements' (through various ngos) into a
bureaucracy which, despite the public image, is in fact more
open than the rather secretive and centralised British state.
Now, the point is that while New Labour may be ideologically
more attracted to the liberal US model, it is bound by EU
law to implement the corporatist / gender equality model.
It can drag its feet in some ways (eg in the implementation
process) and can lay the blame on ÒEuropeÓ.
(This is what seems to be happening in the 'Cherie Booth case'
where the government is resisting the extension of parental
leave to all parents with children under 5 on implementation
date, and arguing instead that only parents with children
born after that date have the parental leave right. The government
is seen as almost bound to lose, but for employers it is the
EU which can now take the blame). Similarly, Tony Blair has
been on conference crusades to persuade the 'Europeans' to
drop their model and turn to his 'Third Way', which he claims
is the only suitable response to globalisation - but with
little success.
A good example of this 'noisy / quiet' contradiction is the
New Deal for Lone Parents. Underlying its moral purpose in
're-integrating' unemployed lone mothers into society (as
if they were in some way marginal just because they do not
have paid work), the DSS and DfEE apparently see the policy
as a means of increasing low cost labour supply without increasing
wage inflation (a classic 'latent' reserve army of labour
function, see Grover and Stewart 1999, 2000). But how can
this work when at the same time the government is having to
equalise the rights and pay of part-time workers (where the
majority will find jobs), provide and possibly pay for parental
leave, extend maternity payments, implement working time directives,
and so on? (See also Walby,1997, 1999 for a similar argument).
An
allied question is why we tend to remain blind to this development.
One reason is the Fabian inheritance in social policy where
the (British) national state is prime actor, together with
the tendency in Sociology to reduce specificity to 'British
society'. These inheritances are no doubt strengthened by
the way our particularly imperialist idea of 'nation' imbues
our understandings. This is probably exacerbated where Britain
is the most centralised state in Europe (even with devolution),
and where the EU is not some sort of 'super centralising state'
(the Conservatives are surely wrong here) but rather something
we are not used to - a fluid multi-focal and multi-tiered
system of governance, albeit at super state level.
How
relevant is this in terms of CAVA's research into active moral
agents and changing practices of parenting and partnering?
I take the view that people do not create their moral views
in a vacuum, and in acting upon them in practice have to navigate
around a structure of opportunities and constraints. One of
these structures is produced by government policy. (Another
important structure, incidentally, is that of local labour
markets). But government policy is not just the 'noisy' New
Labour Atlantacist 'Third Way'. It is also partly the quiet
' EU way'.
2 The EU policy discourse: gender divisions of labour and
balancing home and employment
2.1
Gender as a peripheral economic issue: 1957-early 1970s
Famously, article 119 of the founding Treaty of Rome guarantees
equal pay for equal work. Equally famously (or notoriously)
this apparently pioneering principle was not the outcome of
any concern for gender equality or social justice. Rather,
it was due to the concern of the French government that their
relatively high paid female labour would be undercut by lower
paid labour elsewhere. As such Article 119 remained virtually
a dead letter until the 1970s - although the British refusal
to accept it was one of the reasons for the failure of their
1962 application for membership. However, several constant
themes for EU gender politics can already be distinguished:
1.
Democratisation and demography - or why were the wages of
women workers higher in France?
This was to do with the natalism of French social policy.
From the late 19th century the aim was to integrate single
mothers ( who at least were giving birth!) and working class
women into the labour force, as a means both of maintaining
or expanding fertility rates and ensuring better childrearing.
This policy position was partly rationalised by appeal to
the equality principles of 1789. Read contemporary debates
about 'the demographic time bomb' and 'social citizenship'.
2.
Political economy - or why were French and British women's
wages a (minor) political issue?
Gender 'contracts' implicitly codify how men and women are
positioned with respect to the labour market and to unpaid
caring work, and clearly have important economic effects.
In attempting to reconcile the economic interests of various
nation states with different gender contracts, then gender
issues become more politically visible than is normally the
case in national state discourses (where, except at some critical
'tip-over' points, gender contracts are often given and politically
invisible). And 'reconciling paid work and family life' means
more than increasing women's access to paid work (the equal
opportunities at work agenda). It instead implies a redistribution
of work and status between women and men. Read contemporary
disputes over parental leave and part-time work.
2.2
Gendering the economic agenda: mid-1970s to the 1990s
In this period the impact of second-wave feminism, combined
with the EU's need to achieve political popularity / respectability
(it couldn't just be seen as a club for business) as well
as the growing importance of women in the labour force at
a time of economic problems, all combined to put gender equality
back on the EU agenda. For the same reasons an impressive
array of women's interest groups was inserted into the EU
machinery - the Women's Bureau (1976) later the Equal Opportunities
Unit as part of Directorate General V of the European commission
itself, the Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities for
Men and Women (1981), The Women's Committee of the European
Parliament (1984), the European Women's Lobby (1989) and (although
strictly outside the EU itself) the European Network of Women
(1983) and the Women's Committee of the European Confederation
of Trade Unions. (See Stratigaki 2000 for details.)
The
overall result was that Article 119 had to be put into some
sort of practice. Directives (ie European 'hard law' that
requires implementation by member states, and where non or
improper compliance is subject to legal action from the European
Court of Justice) were enacted on the application of equal
pay for men and women (1975), equal treatment in access to
employment, training and promotion (1976), equal treatment
in social security (1979, in force 1984) equal treatment in
occupational pension and insurance (1986) and equal treatment
in self-employment (1986). During the 1980s action became
more focussed on policy development, and the Equal Opportunities
Unit was given responsibility for Equal Opportunities Action
plans, the First Action Plan in 1982-5 focussing on positive
action programmes and the Second (1986-90) focussing on child
care. (See Hantrais 2000, Stigt et al 2000 for details)
At
the same time, however, this period shows a whole list of
policy failure. Perhaps the most important was the failure
of the proposed directive on day care provision (specifying
minimum levels and quality). Similarly, the proposed parental
and family leave directive of 1983 (vetoed by Britain) was
only reached the statute book under the different conditions
of 1997 (see below, section 2.4). Rather, these proposed directives
added to the mass of EU 'soft law' - recommendations which
do not have to be implemented, are often ignored and lead
to only a few small-scale projects - so the 1992 Child care
recommendation had little effect in Britain for example. These
proposed directives, as well as other measures potentially
effecting a better 'reconciliation of paid work and family
life' were rather threatening to national gender contracts
and as such fell foul of the Council of Ministers (who represent
national governments and are the supreme EU executive). At
this time the Council of Ministers were only too keen to dilute
and 'emasculate' these gender equality proposals (where the
1970s directives had been forced upon it by a mixture of political
pressure and legal contradiction). This reaction was, if anything,
eased by Britain's opting out of the 1989 Charter on workers'
rights and the Maastricht Treaty 'Social Charter' in 1992.
The Council of Ministers could use potential British opposition
to gender equality issues as a smokescreen for their own opposition.
Germany was a notable player here, seeking to preserve its
own 'strong breadwinner' gender contract (the principle of
subsidiarity enshrined in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty was also
useful here). However, as Threfall (2000) points out, all
this goes to show that it is not so much the EU in itself
which is at fault here, as feminist critics imply (like Simon
Duncan 1996 - sic), but national governments. Indeed the European
Commission seems much more 'women friendly' than the Council
of Ministers. (This situation was to change with the accession
of Sweden - a state feminist version of the 7th Cavalry -
to the EU in 1994).
The
policy discourse result of all this was one of increasing
women's access to paid work. The social partnership of capital
and labour was also gendered, and gender equality at work
was the means of improving this situation. Diagrammatically
this became expressed by comparative national labour market
participation rates for women and as such became part and
parcel of many EU documents on women and employment during
the period, even forming the cover of one document. Figure
1 shows my own 1995 interpretation, but note that this is
exceptional in being analysed by country types. In general,
these differences remained unexplained in terms of gender
or welfare regime, and were portrayed as givens to be improved
through technical rather than structural measures.
This
discourse was, however, subject to a whole range of technical
and conceptual critiques - increasing participation almost
disappeared if measured by hours worked or wages received,
part-time and 'atypical' was not distinguished (where women
held the bulk of such jobs and many were low paid and peripheral),
was increasing participation just a double burden anyway,
was improved access to employment that central to gender equality,
especially given all the foregoing, and did not inequality
have more to do with wider social and cultural factors with
employment just one outcome - so that increased employment
would just reflect existing inequality (Britain being a good
case) rather than change it. See Duncan 1996.
This
discourse was changed during the 1990s to one emphasising
the 'reconciliation of paid work with family life' and, implicitly
(and usually unrecognised by the EU itself), redistributing
work (including unpaid care) and status between women and
men. This was to do with the arrival of the Seventh Cavalry
(a somewhat male image this) in the form of the accession
of Sweden and Finland in 1994, and to the increasing influence
of another, parallel but at first unlinked policy discourse
that had been bubbling along during the 1980s - the 'demographic
time bomb'.
2.3
The demographic time bomb and gender relations
Europe is supposedly in the throes of the 'Second Demographic
Transition'. Although a contested term - some demographers
would see it a continuation of the first, some see more than
two - all are agreed on the trends that make it up (see Fig
2). Put simply fertility has declined in Europe to below replacement
levels in most European countries, and on current trends by
2010 deaths in the EU will outnumber births. At the same time
the EU population is ageing, with the so-called 'dependency
ratio' of the old to those of working age increasing. Partly
accounting for these 'output trends' are the decline in marriages,
and the increase in divorce, cohabitation, lone parenthood,
age of marriage and age of first childbirth - all factors
which are usually (although not necessarily) connected with
lower fertility. And behind this, theorists have it, are processes
of individualisation, democratisation and emancipation - or
rather, as the theorists implied, women are getting jobs and
generally having a life instead of bearing children in traditional
marriages.
Somewhat
comically, as Solsona (2001) points out, the highly gendered
aspect of these issues - after all we are talking about getting
pregnant - is often so forgotten in technocratic demography
that you would think fertility was a result of immaculate
conception. Women's changing behaviour was seen as a negative
and almost asocial development, even if this had to be accepted,
rather than the result of creative social choices. As Solsona
goes on to point out, the basic cause of the second demographic
transition is the incompatability of housewife marriage with
women's economic and social aspirations, and the fact that
replacements for housewife marriage are (currently) less compatable
with child-rearing. This is one explanation for why Germany,
Italy and Spain show the lowest ever recorded completed fertility
rates while, in 'women-friendly' Sweden and Denamark, birth
rates are the highest in western Europe.
Whatever
the causes, however, this 'demographic time bomb' is now seen
as a crucial question for national governments and the EU
alike for both economic and realpolitik reasons. First, this
'disturbing demographic situation' (EC 1989) is seen as a
sign that the EU will lose its world power status, where population
size is interpreted as political and economic might. Secondly,
an ageing population is seen both as a particular problem
in itself, because of the expected overload of pension systems,
health and social services, as well as a more general economic
problem - as the EC 1994 White Paper put it more old people,
and less young, means less (and less able) labour supply,
less free capital for investment and less free spending power.
Hence an ageing population will mean lower economic growth,
lower competitiveness, less employment and less power (see
Hantrais 1999). There are of course various counter-arguments.
For instance age and ageing are partly socially defined, so
that the old are not or need not be seen as a burden, that
increased expenditure necessary to deal with any increased
'burden' is in fact only a small amount relative to GDP, that
productivity has increased in the past and will continue to
do so (so that less workers can support more 'dependents'),
that immigration can easily supply the required numbers of
young working and childbearing people, and so on. I will not
go into these here, although they do deserve more serious
consideration (and their relative neglect fuels fears that
the 'demographic time bomb' is in fact simply another excuse
for more neo-liberal welfare state cutting). Rather, it is
important to note that the EU took this discourse on board
during the 1980s and 1990s, so much so that Article 7 of the
1992 Maastricht Treaty is concerned solely about the need
to address these 'population problems'.
There
are perhaps two sets of policy response to this situation.
First are negative / prescriptive measures like reducing pension
payments, increasing the retirement age or redefining women
as childbearers in traditional households. These either treat
treat symptoms rather than causes, or are impossible to implement.
Enter, then, positive and supportive policies. Here the problem
is not seen as changing demographic behaviour as such, but
rather as a problem where institutional structures have not
kept up with changing social expectations and behaviour. The
solution here is to use social policy to change this situation.
Hence the idea of 'reconciling employment and family life'
- change the structures so that women (and men) can both have
a life and have babies. (Both the question and the response
are central CAVA issues incidentally - we are after all researching
into parenting, partnering and welfare reform - possibly we
should be less parochial and aim our output into this debate
as much as we do at British social policy ).
The
outcome of this discourse, then, dovetails into the conclusions
of the 'equal opportunities' gender equality debate also taking
place in the 1980s. Just getting women into employment may
not change that much in gender equality terms, and may make
things worse in demographic time bomb terms. Rather, what
is needed is to change the way 'work' and 'home' are related.
This 'reconciliation' also implies (although the EU seems
to shy away from saying this) a reorganisation of gender roles
and the gendering of work. At this conjuncture Sweden and
Finland joined the EU, and this was decisive in getting this
new discourse onto the policy agenda. For these countries
were not only officially committed to gender equality, with
substantial policy measures already in place (eg Sweden has
18 month parental leave at 80% of wages, where 1 month must
be taken by the father, parents have rights to 60 paid days
per annum to look after sick children and to reduce their
jobs -unpaid- to 75% working time). In addition gender equality
had become central to the political economy in these countries,
where women were both integrated into the labour force on
near equal terms to men and were politically powerful. Crucially,
women were worried about joining what they saw as a 'women-hostile
EU' and threatened to scupper accession to the EU (in both
Sweden and Norway - which of course voted not to join - a
majority women voted against EU membership, and in Finland
only a bare majority of women voted for membership). Around
the same time Denmark at first voted against the Maastricht
Treaty (and later voted narrowly for) - and in both referenda
most women voted against the treaty, again largely for gender
equality reasons (see Liebert 1999). All these countries were
in the position of having to prove to women that the EU was
worth it. The task became one, then, of exporting the Nordic
model to the EU rather than the other way round. As I have
described, these countries were to some extent knocking on
an open door (and ironically the intellectual origins of the
Swedish/ Nordic welfare model can be traced to the Myrdal's
report on the Swedish population crisis of the 1930s). Hence
the current policy discourse, which I will briefly describe
below, of mainstreaming gender and of reconciling employment
with family life.
2.4
Mainstreaming gender and reconciling employment and family
life: the 1990s and beyond
The idea of equal opportunities at work was increasingly becoming
seen as too limited, or even counterproductive, for either
achieving gender equality or in addressing the 'demographic
time bomb', as described in the previous sections. By the
late 80s and early 90s then, sections of the EC and its actors
had begun to talk about 'reconciling employment and family
life' and 'mainstreaming' gender. While it is important to
note this word 'sections' - other , more powerful actors like
the Council of Ministers remained lukewarm - social policy
in general and gender issues as one part of this were also
becoming more prominent in the the 'hard', male, central EU
economic discourse.
This
prominence was partly because of the increased awareness of
the importance of social policy for the economy. Reconciling
employment and paid work became seen as an answer to the economic
problems resulting from the second demographic transition
and globalisation, in a situation where the core EU economies
were in recession. Ageing and low fertility, and creating
a flexible labour force, could be addressed by reconciliation.
The gender discourse could then fit into and exploit this
agenda, given further impetus in the mid-1990s by the accession
of Finland and Sweden who had to deliver a 'gendered EU' to
their home constituency.
There
was also an important shift in the decision-making apparatus
of the EU in this period, a shift which reduced the influence
of the Council of Ministers - always hidebound by their national
perspectives - and gave legislative initiative to the 'social
partners'. Partly, this shift was seen as a means of outflanking
recalcitrant national governments, not least Britain. Capital
and labour, or more precisely the organisations representing
European trade unions, large employers and small employers,
were able to jointly initiate policy agreements which would
ultimately lead to directives and recommendations. This is
the so-called 'social dialogue'. (A 'civil dialogue' has also
emerged, based on agreements between NGOs and user movements).
And the social partners were very concerned about flexibility.
EU
pronouncements and agreements (preeminently the 1992 Maastricht
treaty, a number of social policy white and green papers)
became peppered with references to reconciliation and the
1995-97 Third Action Plan took reconciliation as its prime
theme. The Equal Opportunities Unit was moved from employment
to social policy, where the new Swedish Director General added
family policy to its remit. A first stage saw reconciliation
of family life and employment in terms of women's flexibility
with directives on maternity leave and a recommendation on
childcare in 1992. A second stage saw this extended to reconciliation
of family life and employment for women and men, as
the Social Dialogue and the Action Plan gathered steam, and
as the new Swedish and Finnish commissioners and advisors
got to work. This phase saw the emergence of the long delayed
directive on parental leave and a directive on equal rights
in part-time employment. As always, it is important to remember
that legislation was a watered down version of the original
proposals, as Threfall (2000) puts it, just as the EU seemed
to recognise what gender equality actually meant it became
quite timid and cautious! This timidity was encouraged by
an apparently reactionary judgment from the European Court
of Human Rights (the 'Kalenke' case) the implications of which
were exploited by some unenthusiastic national governments,
not least Britain. So for many countries, this legislation
for minimum provisions was merely setting a base line marker
where their own measures were already superior. But for Britain,
after 1997 back into the social agreements - this low level
base line represented a significant advance.
Denmark,
Finland and Sweden still had to deliver, however. A new top-level
Commission structure was set up in 1995 - the Group of Commissioners
on Equality between Men and Women and Women's Rights. Two
of the four commissioners were women from Scandinavia, and
'mainstreaming gender' became the central agenda and a Norwegian
expert was brought in to advise on implementation. Indeed
the EU became the major champion of the mainstreming principle
adopted by the 1995 UN Beijing Women's conference. This was
further buttressed by a Fourth Action Programme (1996-2000)
centred on reconciliation and care. Both reconciliation and
gender mainstreaming - 'the systematic consideration of the
differences between the condition, situation and and needs
of women and men in all Community policies, at the point of
planning, implementation and evaluation' (EC 1997, quoted
in Hantrais 2000) - became enshrined in the 1997 Amsterdam
Treaty. Gender euality is now a fundamental principle of EU
activity. Reconciliation was also codified further in the
1997 Luxembourg employment meeting and the 1998 Employment
Guidelines, where equality of opportunity became one of the
'four pillars' or lines of action for the Commission (the
others being to increase emnployability, encourage adaptability,
and develop entrepreneurship). Linked to this, EU gender policy
began to delve into important areas outside the work-care
axis, with initiatives on domestic violence, trafficking and
prostitution, and sexual harassment.
What
does mainstreaming actually imply? Does it represent gender
issues leaving the ghetto of a peripheral discourse to enter
the mainstream, or will gender policy become 'broad and shallow'
rather than 'narrow and deep' as it enters the 'malestream'
? Feminist commentators tend towards the 'tokenistic' interpretation
where no extra resources have been allocated to achieve or
monitor mainstreaming, when the existing infrastructure has
been undermined (eg the Women's unit is no longer in pro-active
position). Mainstreaming has even been used as an excuse in
the attempt (narrowly averted) to remove specific gender equality
projects or structures with the rationale that as gender was
now mainstreamed, there was no longer any need for them! The
Committee on Women's Rights found that the Commission, the
Council of Ministers and member states had indeed disregarded
the mainstreaming principle in nearly all the central programmes
structuring future EU policy . This indeed makes mainstreaming
look like rhetoric, although at least this was found out and
some corrections (but not a total redraft) have been made
(Schunter-Kleemann, 1999).
All
this his sounds depressing, but actually a more optimistic
view is possible. Catherine Hoskyns (personal communication)
makes the point that mainstreaming will not work if the dominant
EU discourse - which is one about economic success - does
not change. But in a way it has changed, for the debates about
the demographic time bomb and flexible labour - key issues
in the realisation of economic success - gives reconciliation
of employment and family life a central economic role. And,
as Threfall (2000) points out, the reconciliation of employment
and family life is highly gendered. It brings the issue of
care firmly onto the agenda, and this ultimately means men
spending less time at paid work and more time raising children,
looking after the old and sick, or carrying out domestic chores.
2.5
An interim conclusion
In assessing the role of the EU we are always faced with the
'half-empty or half-full' problem. In the past, I have subscribed
to the 'half-empty' view (Duncan 1996) - EU gender policy
is more about rhetoric than reality, and does not make much
difference in women's lives. Young (2000) updates this position
taking into account the increased visibilty of gender issues
in the EU since 1995. While admitting that EU gender equality
measures can be important for those countries with worse situations
(Britain, Ireland and southern Europe), she sees this as making
little difference in the wider political-economic context
of making the EU 'a flexible transnational global production
site' (2000) in the neo-liberal image (and just look at those
'four pillars' announced at Luxembourg). So on the one hand,
for instance, EU policy supports women entering the labour
force while on the other its increasingly neo-liberal economic
policy means public sector cuts and privatisation. Worse,
she sees EU gender policy as just a means of transforming
women - hitherto protected, if also subordinated, in Keynsian
fordism - into individual workers without social protection
on the US model. Even for the gender equality measures themselves,
all the same old problems of procedure versus substance, and
of actual implementation, that I wrote about in 1996 remain
(Keller and Sšrries, 1999).
In
writing this paper, however, I have been converted to the
'half-full' view - EU policy makes a significant difference.
This is for several reasons. Partly, where EU gender policy
seemed weak in comparison with those in Scandinavia, it now
seems to offer a real means of generalising more from the
Scandinavian experience rather than, as formerly, from the
German 'breadwinner' view of gender roles. Maybe Brigitte
Young's critique is just too economically determinist. This
has been emphasised by the contrasts between the noisy British
Atlantacist welfare debate, and the quiet EU debate on reconciling
employment and family life - the latter just seems so much
more advanced and progressive, a point reinforced by the somewhat
primitive sounding US sources for parts of the New Labour
discourse see Deacon Workshop paper 4). And, as we have seen,
EU directives have to be implemented by the British government
even where this undermines its own policy preferences. Finally,
reconciliation and the demographic time bomb insert the gendered
redistribution of work and care into EU -and hence British
- social and economic policy. All this makes EU policy important
for CAVA - after all parenting, partnering and care are our
concerns and here is a central political debate about those
very issues. Perhaps we should look beyond the rather parochial
New Labour debate.
References
Bang,H., Jensen, P. and Pfau-Effinger,B. (2001) 'Gender and
European welfare states: contexts, structure and agency' Chapter
9 of Duncan, S. and Pfau-Effinger, B Gender, Work and Culture
in the EU, London, Routledge.
Deacon, A (2000) ' Competing formulations of moral agency
in relation to welfare, partnership and parenting' Cava workshop
paper 4
Drew, E (2001) 'Reconciling divisions of labour' Chapter 4
of Duncan, S. and Pfau- Effinger, B Gender, Work and Culture
in the EU, London, Routledge.
Duncan, s. s. (1996) 'Obstacles to a successful equal opportunities
Policy in the European Union' The European Journal of Women's
Studies, 3,4 399-422.
Forsberg, G, GonŠs, L and Perrons, D (2001) 'Paid work:
participation, inclusion and liberation' Chapter 5 of Duncan,
S. and Pfau-Effinger, B Gender, Work and Culture in the
EU, London, Routledge.
Grover, C. and Stewart, J. (1999) ''Market workfare', social
security, social regulation and competitiveness ' Journal
of Social Policy, 28,1,73-96.
Grover, C. and Stewart, J. (2000) ' Modernising social security?
Labour and the welfare to work strategy' Social Policy
and Administration, September.
Hantrais, L. (1999) 'Socio-demographic change, policy impacts
and outcomes in social Europe' Journal of European Social
Policy, 9, 4, 291-309.
Hantrais, L. (2000) 'From equal pay to reconciliation of employment
and family life' ch. 1 of Hantrais, L (ed) Gendered Policies
in Europe: reconciling employment and family life, London,
Macmillan.
Keller, B. and Sšrries, B (1999) ' The new European social
dialogue: old wine in new bottles?' Journal European Social
Policy, 9, 2, 111-125.
Liebert, U. (1999) 'Gender politics in the European Union':
the return of the public' European Societies, 1, 2,
191-232.
Sackmann, R (2001)'Living through the myths: gender , values,
attitudes and practices' Chapter 9 of Duncan, S. and Pfau-Effinger,
B Gender, Work and Culture in the EU, London, Routledge.
Schunter - Kleemann, S (1999) 'Euro-club, globalisation and
gender eregime' Paer presented at the confernce on 'Gender
and markets in the reconstruction of European Welfare States',
University of Bremen, July.
Solsona, M and Gonzalez-Lopez, M-J (2001) 'Households and
families - changing living arrangements and gender 'relations'
Chapter 3 of Duncan, S. and Pfau- Effinger, B Gender, Work
and Culture in the EU, London, Routledge.
Stigt, J., van Doorne-Huiskes, A and Schippers, J (2000) 'European
regulations and initiatives on work-family policies' ch. 8
of den Dulk, L., van Doorne-Huiskes, A. and Schippers, J.
Work- Family Arrangements in Europe, Amsterdam, Thela
Thesis
Stratigaki, M (2000) 'The European Union and the equal opportunities
process' ch. 2 of Hantrais, L (ed) Gendered Policies in Europe:
reconciling employment and family life' London, Macmillan
Threfall, M. (2000) 'Taking stock and looking ahead' ch. 10
of Hantrais, L (ed) Gendered Policies in Europe: reconciling
employmenty and family life', London, Macmillan.
Walby, S (1997) Gender Transformations, London, Routledge.
Walby, S (1999) 'Changes in women's employment in the United
Kingdom' New Political Economy, 4,2, 195-213.
BACK
|
