Welfare Regimes in Relation to Paid Work and Care A View from the United States on Social Protection in the European Countries (original) (raw)
2000
Parents throughout Europe and the United States share the common chal- lenge of balancing responsibilities in the labor market and at home; mothers and fathers everywhere grapple with establishing divisions of labor at home that are equitable and economically viable. Yet despite relatively common problems across contemporary welfare states, social and labor market poli- cies vary dramatically in the level
Related papers
What a state she's in! Western welfare states and equitable social entitlements
Journal of Global Ethics, 2006
The issue of care work as become a burning issue in western capitalist welfare states because of the greater proportion of women in the work force and the growth of alternative forms of family arrangement outside of the traditional male breadwinner model. This paper addresses equity and welfare states with respect to social entitlements around care. I ask how new theoretical concepts can be applied to understand welfare states and their evolving employment-related family policies, using Nancy Fraser's utopian universal caregiver approach as a model for evaluation. I focus on carers and evaluate how a modern citizen is expected to be financially self-sufficient and yet also perform care duties at home. The term carer-commodification captures the extent to which the state expects carers to engage in the labour market and how non-carer earners are engaged in care duties. The term carer-stratification incorporates the extent to which the state creates differences between carers. I select policies from selective welfare states (Sweden, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the U.S.) to evaluate them speculatively with these tools and to illustrate how they fare with equitable social entitlements.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.