ESRC RESEARCH GROUP ON CARE, VALUES AND THE FUTURE OF WELFARE

University of Leeds

Paper given at the ESRC 4th National Social Science Conference, 28th November 2000, London.

Fiona Williams
Time to Care; Time not to Care

Summary

• Family-friendly policies are at last on the agenda, but there is still a long way to go. Provisions for working parents are amongst the lowest in Europe. 77% women in paid work complain of stress through lack of time.
• We need new thinking in this area. The rationale for family-friendly policies is work-centred: they encourage people into paid work; they are good for business and the new economy. An important step, but is it enough? Will it impact upon the gender imbalance in care responsibilities?
• The principles underpinning policies for Work/Life balance need to balance the work ethic with a care ethic. This would recognize care of the self and care of others as meaningful activities in their own right.
• What are the implications of a care ethic for our political value system?
• It would value interdependence alongside independence and autonomy: we are all of us, after all, the givers and receivers of care
• It would enable us to think about how to balance and integrate three dimensions of time and space: personal time and space for the maintenance of mind, body and soul; care time and space for the care of others; work time and space for economic self-sufficiency of the household.
• It would incorporate the vision of a 'relational' society with that of an 'individualised' society which acknowledged that relationships matter to people at home and at work.
• Rather than assume a decline in family values, it would provide a robust assessment of the positive and constructive values to emerge from the changes in family life, such as mutual respect, individuality, acceptance of diversity.
• What are the implications for policies?
• A broader approach: people are not only influenced by economic rationality but by the diverse moral and cultural contexts in which they live. It would combine a new politics of care with a new politics of time.
• A new politics of care would acknowledge men and women as carers; policies are needed which support men and women in the different choices they make. Services marked by quality, variety, accessibility, flexibility, affordability. Paid care work to be better rewarded. It would be about environments. Work/Life practices are about streets, restaurants and shops being safe and open to children and older people. It would recognize the needs of those with and without children -sabbaticals as well as parental leave; time for lifelong learning.
• A new politics of time recognises that the key worker/employer negotiating tool is about time as much as pay. Moves towards trade union agreed frameworks within which individuals can negotiate their hours. Development of annualised hours and life-time working hours giving opportunities to balance work and life.

Paper

Family-friendly policies are at last seriously on the agenda, but there is still a long way to go. Maternity and paternity provisions for working parents in the UK are amongst the worst in Europe. UK fathers work the longest hours in Europe and complain that they do not have enough time with their children. ¹

This hits working mothers the hardest, as they tend to take most responsibility for care. More than three-quarters of working mothers say they feel stressed through lack of time from juggling between paid work and care responsibilities.² Here, a young mother explains her move from full time to part time work

What this quote reveals is that the individual work/life balancing act juggles three important things: first, time - for her child and for herself; but more than this it is about quality time. The second issue is time for the quality of her relationships; and the third is money - the capacity for economic self-sufficiency. Other research shows that mothers' decisions about paid work are influenced by what they feel is morally right for themselves as mothers and for their children rather than simple economic rationality. This moral reasoning is also influenced in different ways by mothers' support networks and where they live.⁴ There is a further aspect to people's work/life aspirations which is about paid work as a source of self-esteem and personal support. The quality of relationships at work are as important as at home. ⁵

In general, with women's greater participation in paid work, two strategies have emerged in two parent households: the first is a dual full-time employment strategy where both parents are in full time work. ⁶ But without subsidised care provision this tends to be restricted to partnered women in professional or managerial jobs, and without shared care responsibilities at home it makes women's lives stressful. The second strategy is the part-time/full-time split where women work part-time and take on most of the care responsibilities. In this situation men often take on overtime to compensate for lowered household income and women find their career development and job opportunities limited. This strategy doesn't meet men or women's aspirations for quality time for themselves (women) or for their children (men); it ignores women's skills and employment capacity, especially given the insecure and low paid nature of part-time work; it renders women very vulnerable on divorce, and it is not really an option for single parents unless they have child care help from their own mothers or friends.

This suggests that the model or the principle upon which we base work-life balance needs rethinking: it needs to address the gender imbalance in care responsibilities and also challenge the idea - which underpins both the strategies I have mentioned - that the 'real' worker is an economically self-sufficient individual (male or female) whose care needs and responsibilities are rendered invisible because they are carried out by someone else. We may have moved away from the male breadwinner model but have we moved away from the male worker model?

It is this model of economic self-sufficiency which underpins the work ethic. There has been much emphasis recently upon paid work as the central responsibility of citizenship, as the basis to a good parenting model, and as the goal for policies on social exclusion. But is this broad enough a principle to meet the aspirations which people have around time and the quality of their relationships. I want to suggest that the work ethic needs to be balanced by a care ethic, which recognises care of both the self and others as meaningful activities in their own right - something which involves us all, men and women, old and young.⁷ We are all, after all, at some level, the givers and receivers of care from others. It's an activity that binds us all.

So how can the care ethic help?

Balancing these two ethics of work and care enables us to think about time and space differently. Rather than care needs being fitted in to the traditional requirements of work, we can start by asking what is important for the following three areas of our lives?

Personal time and space: what do we need for the maintenance of body, mind and soul (e.g. to read a book, go for a drink, go for a walk)?

Care time and space: what do we need to care properly for those who depend on us

Work time and space: What do we need to enable us to gain economic self-sufficiency and balance these other areas?

All these areas are interlinked - for some people quality time with their children provides them with the regenerative qualities of personal time (indeed, recent research shows that working mothers spend more time with their children now than non-working mothers did in the 1970s⁸). For others, relationships at work are a key to their personal well-being.

If we begin to attach policies to these three areas it might begin to look like this.

Strategies for Work/Life Balance

Adapted from Yeandle, 1999

So, for example, policies would involve not only childcare but elder care. Greater variety, flexibility and accessibility and affordability are the demands made by women. Care also raises issues of the infrastructure of public space - pubs and restaurants, safer streets, transport.

Integrating these three areas enables us to realise that the balance of people's personal/care/work time and space differs for individuals and also over their lifetimes. Rather than only having leave for those with care responsibilities, leave can be extended to sabbaticals which meet needs for personal time. More innovatively, arrangements where workers negotiate their hours on the basis of a total of annualised hours gives them flexibility to balance their personal and care times. Even more innovative is the concept of lifetime working hours. After the war the assumption was that the lifetime working hours norm was 100,000 hours. The average now is about 70,000. However if this were reduced to 50,000 for men and women, as proposed by the European Trade Union Federation, it could offer people flexibility in terms of care responsibilities, education and training, partial retirement, periods of part-time work, and so on. In some European countries reduced hours is combined with opportunities for job creation. These forms of positive and negotiated flexibility also make business sense in terms of optimising human capital, enhancing worker effectiveness, spreading incomes to create new markets for goods and services, and providing more flexible services for the consumer.

An ethic of care can provide us with a more robust assessment of the new, positive and constructive values that are emerging (although by no means universal) in the day-to-day relationships between partners and parents and children: they are more about negotiated commitment than duty, the acknowledgement of individuality and diversity rather than hierarchy and conformity; consent rather than obedience; respect rather than respectability; actively challenging and not passively accepting violence and abuse. These values also blur the boundaries between care givers and care receivers. Children, old people, disabled people are not hidden burdens of care, but have voices to be heard and contributions to be recognised. Above all, the care ethic, like the work ethic, is a key dimension of citizenship. We learn the civic virtues of responsibility, of trust, of responsiveness, of recognition of diversity, as much through receiving and giving care as through paid work.

Finally, let me relate these ideas to the theme of the conference: New Society or New Individualism? The quest for work/life balance reveals a desire for greater connectedness one for another in which our 'trajectories of the self' are continually negotiated and revised by the relationships and networks in which we are embedded. This is what the Tomorrow Project and others have called the development of a 'relational society'.¹² I would suggest that this is not an either/or of a 'new society or new individualism', but that what links this 'new society' and 'new individualism' is a 'new relationality' which emphasises care, time and the quality of relationships.

Read the NFPI's reponse to the DTI's consultation paper, Work & Parents, here:

http://www.nfpi.org/data/research/dti_con_sul.htm

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