Section 1.7: Reconciling Work and Family Life
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Benefits and services: Flexible worktime, flexible work place, flexible (fringe or non-wage benefits) benefits, care services, paid time off for family reasons including care of an ill child and paying a visit to a child's school on important occasions, topping off of statutory maternity/paternity/family leave benefits, coordination of employee vacations with school vacations, and other family-friendly policies, sometimes provided as statutory benefits and services, sometimes provided by employers through trade union negotiations, and sometimes voluntarily. Some businesses provide employee assistance programs or employee counseling programs, whose services may help employees manage these potential conflicts and tensions. |
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Purpose: To help employee-parents manage the pressures and stresses of balancing work and personal and family life. To facilitate the meshing of family and work responsibilities so that children and family life do not suffer deprivation. Current debates in this field revolve around such issues as: a) whether it is fair to impose costs on businesses; b) whether people who do not have children should be sharing the burden of those who do; and c) whether it is the role of government or businesses or employees to take the lead in resolving these issues.
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History: As growing proportions of parents, whether in two-or one-parent families also hold full-time or part-time jobs under various shift arrangements, the pressures on parents and families have increased and the search for policies that are more responsive to contemporary families has emerged. Most families are nuclear, rather than extended, and a growing number of families are headed by only one parent. As a result, businesses and governments have come to recognize the importance of maternity-paternity-parental-family leaves and ECCE programs, which we cover elsewhere. Other types of family friendly policies have emerged in different countries, depending on the extent and nature of statutory provision which provides the basic framework.
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| Coverage and Take-up: In many countries most of these benefits are statuary. In the U.S., except for ECEC, most of these benefits are provided by large firms, manufacturers, financial services, and/or unionized firms but are usually not available to employees in small, service oriented firms. Moreover, there is often an issue of what is normative at the workplace and whether the culture of the firm makes taking advantage of theoretically available benefits and services acceptable behavior for a "serious" employee. | |
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See Parental Leave section and Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) section for further information. Also see Table 2.15a, 2.15b, and 2.17a. The following tables are available to view and print in pdf format. |
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ReferencesDex, Shirley (2003). Families and Work in the Twenty-first Century. Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Policy Press. European Network Family & Work (1998). Equality between Women and Men. Employment & Social Affairs Division. International Labor Organization, Maternity Protection at Work: Revision of the Maternity Protection Convention (Revised), 1952 (No. 103). Recommendation No. 53 (No. 95), Report V (1). Geneva: International Labor Organization. Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers, Support for Working Families, The American Prospect, Volume 12, Issue 1.Washington, DC. Jerry A. Jacobs and Janet C. Gornick, Hours of Paid Work in Dual-Earner Couples: The U.S. in Cross-National Perspective, Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper No. 253, New York: Syracuse University. OECD (2001). Balancing Work and Family Life: Helping Parents into Paid Employment, in OECD Employment Outlook. Paris, France: OECD. OECD (2002). Babies and Bosses: Reconciling Work and Family Life; Vol. I, Australia, Denmark, and Netherlands. Paris, France. OECD (2003). Babies and Bosses: Reconciling Work and Family Life; Vol. II, Austria, Ireland, and Japan. Paris, France. Maria-Anna PARASKEVA (2002). "Reconciliation of Work and Family as a Means to Promote Women's Participation in the Labour Market." This is a document from the European Employment Strategy, click here to download. U.S Department of Labor, Monthly Labor Review, March 2004, pp. 117, 118. |
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