scholarly journals Configurations of Care Work: Paid and Unpaid Elder Care in Italy and the Netherlands

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Glucksmann ◽  
Dawn Lyon
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Family Care ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Voluntary Sector ◽  
The State ◽  
Unpaid Work ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Public Provision ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
Paid And Unpaid Work

Most current sociological approaches to work recognise that the same activity may be undertaken within a variety of socio-economic forms - formal or informal, linked with the private market, public state or not-for-profit sectors. This article takes care of the elderly as an exemplary case for probing some of the linkages between paid and unpaid work. We attempt to unravel the interconnections between forms of care work undertaken in different socio-economic conditions in two settings, the Netherlands and Italy. The research is part of a broader programme concerned with differing interconnections and overlaps between work activities. In this article, we are concerned with: 1) how paid and unpaid care work map on to four ‘institutional’ modes of provision - by the state, family, market, and voluntary sector; and 2) with the configurations that emerge from the combination of different forms of paid and unpaid work undertaken through the different institutions. Despite the centrality of family-based informal care by women in both countries, we argue that the overall configurations of care are in fact quite distinct. In the Netherlands, state-funded care services operate to shape and anchor the centrality of family as the main provider. In this configuration, unpaid familial labour is sustained by voluntary sector state-funded provision. In Italy, by contrast, there is significant recourse to informal market-based services in the form of individual migrant carers, in a context of limited public provision. In this configuration, the state indirectly supports market solutions, sustaining the continuity of family care as an ideal and as a practice.

scholarly journals Reducing and Redistributing Unpaid Work

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (225) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristian Alonso ◽  
Mariya Brussevich ◽  
Era Dabla-Norris ◽  
Yuko Kinoshita ◽  
Kalpana Kochhar
Keyword(s):  
The Elderly ◽  
Unpaid Work ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Household Chores ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Family Friendly ◽  
Recent Trends

Unpaid work, such as caring for children, the elderly, and household chores represents a significant share of economic activity but is not counted as part of GDP. Women disproportionately shoulder the burden of unpaid work: on average, women do two more hours of unpaid work per day than men, with large differences across countries. While much unpaid care work is done entirely by choice, constraints imposed by cultural norms, labor market features or lack of public services, infrastructure, and family-friendly policies matter. This undermines female labor force participation and lowers economy-wide productivity. In this paper, we examine recent trends in unpaid work around the world using aggregate and individual-level data, explore potential drivers, and identify policies that can help reduce and redistribute unpaid work across genders. Conservative model-based estimates suggest that the gains from these policies could amount to up to 4 percent of GDP.

scholarly journals Emerging Gender Regimes and Policies for Gender Equality in a Wider Europe

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-394 ◽  
Author(s):  
GILLIAN PASCALL ◽  
JANE LEWIS
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
National Level ◽  
Unpaid Work ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
Gender Policy ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Gender Regimes ◽  
Paid And Unpaid Work

This article addresses some implications for gender equality and gender policy at European and national levels of transformations in family, economy and polity, which challenge gender regimes across Europe. Women's labour market participation in the west and the collapse of communism in the east have undermined the systems and assumptions of western male breadwinner and dual worker models of central and eastern Europe. Political reworking of the work/welfare relationship into active welfare has individualised responsibility. Individualisation is a key trend west – and in some respects east – and challenges the structures that supported care in state and family. The links that joined men to women, cash to care, incomes to carers have all been fractured. The article will argue that care work and unpaid care workers are both casualties of these developments. Social, political and economic changes have not been matched by the development of new gender models at the national level. And while EU gender policy has been admired as the most innovative aspect of its social policy, gender equality is far from achieved: women's incomes across Europe are well below men's; policies for supporting unpaid care work have developed modestly compared with labour market activation policies. Enlargement brings new challenges as it draws together gender regimes with contrasting histories and trajectories. The article will map social policies for gender equality across the key elements of gender regimes – paid work, care work, income, time and voice – and discuss the nature of a model of gender equality that would bring gender equality across these. It analyses ideas about a dual earner–dual carer model, in the Dutch combination scenario and ‘universal caregiver’ models, at household and civil society levels. These offer a starting point for a model in which paid and unpaid work are equally valued and equally shared between men and women, but we argue that a citizenship model, in which paid and unpaid work obligations are underpinned by social rights, is more likely to achieve gender equality.

scholarly journals Gendered Articulations of Control and Care on Social Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Hungary

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katinka Linnamäki
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Care Workers ◽  
Elderly Population ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
System Of Care ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Care Workers ◽  
The Government

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Hungarian Fidesz-KDNP government´s discursive practices of control and care during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper researches the Hungarian government’s communication on the official Hungarian COVID-19 Facebook page during the first wave of the pandemic. Its aim is to answer the question how the Hungarian government articulated control and care to reinforce sedimented gendered division of care work and institutions of control to tackle the potential disruption of the system of care before the widespread vaccination of the elderly population was available in the country. The paper argues that the pandemic has allowed the government to exert control in areas, such as the crisis in the workforce market and health care system, as well as in the destabilized system of care work. The main finding is that in the material the government performs control over care work, whose intensified discussion during the pandemic could lead to a potential disruption within the illiberal logic on two different levels. First, physical care work related to immediate physical needs, like hunger, clothing, pain enacted by female shoppers, female health care workers and female social workers, is newly defined during the pandemic as local, family-bound and a naturally female task. Second, the government articulates care work, either as potentially harmful (for the elderly population and thus indirectly to the government’s familialist politics), or as vulnerable and in need of protection from outside influences (portrayed through the interaction of health care workers and “hospital commanders”). This enables the government to perform full state control over care workers through the mobilization of police and military masculinity and to strengthen and re-naturalize the already existing hierarchies between traditional gender roles from a new perspective during the pandemic. This state of affairs highlights the vulnerability both of the elderly population, on whom its familialism builds, and of the system of informal care work, which builds on the unpaid care work of female citizens, who paradoxically are also articulated as potential harm for the elderly and for the system.

Globalization and Transformation of Care in Japan

2014 ◽  
pp. 86-105
Author(s):  
Reiko Ogawa
Keyword(s):  
Family Care ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Foreseeable Future ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
The People ◽  
Integration Policies ◽  
Dialectical Process ◽  
Paid And Unpaid Work

This chapter deals with the situation of family and care work in Japan, and, in particular, the Conjunction between Family, Care Work, and Immigration in Japan. The chapter is aimed to elucidate the complex interplay between family and care work from both paid and unpaid work. Furthermore, Japan currently does not have an immigration policy that would include social integration policies. Since the care needs cannot be met solely by the families or the domestic labor market, globalization of care will become a salient trend for a foreseeable future. Moreover, the chapter proceeds to analyze the globalization thesis within the Japanese context. According to the author, one should be able to see the convergence of welfare states in many countries, but as in the case of Japan, the process of globalization is not linear but contingent. Instead, what one has seen is a dialectical process of how the domestic factors are differently shaping the well-being of the people within their own institutional histories and strategies.

Body work and later-life care in Turkey: a qualitative study of paid and unpaid carers of older people

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (10) ◽  
pp. 2106-2127
Author(s):  
Yelda Özen
Keyword(s):  
Family Care ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Ageing Population ◽  
Life Care ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
Care Givers ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Professional Care ◽  
Home Space

AbstractThe ageing population of Turkey has brought later-life care into question. Family care remains most prevalent, but institutional, paid and professional care are increasing. Literature in Turkey has focused on the medical or social policy aspects but not care-givers’ experiences, nor how the care is performed. This study aims to illuminate care-givers’ experiences using qualitative methods, through in-depth interviews in Ankara with 19 care-givers providing home care for people aged 65 and over. Commonalities and differences were revealed among unpaid family care-givers, paid care-givers and professional care-givers. First, whether paid or unpaid, the bodily and emotional aspects of care work are intertwined. To cope with the ‘negativities’ involved in the work, nurses usually medicalised bodily tasks, unpaid care-givers cited traditional responsibilities and employed infantilisation, while paid care-givers mostly informalised the relationship, infantilised the person cared for and underlined their asexuality. Secondly, care work is gendered; silenced, invisible and ambivalent; related to intimacy with older bodies; and performed in the home space, which blurs the distinction between the private and public field for paid care. Finally, it involves emotional work regarding managing the bodily aspects and navigating the relationships surrounding the older person; and it is labour-intensive with an exploitative character.

Towards an Equal Division of Paid and Unpaid Work: the Case of the Netherlands

1999 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janneke Plantenga ◽  
Joop Schippers ◽  
Jacques Siegers
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Unpaid Work ◽  
Equal Division ◽  
Paid And Unpaid Work

scholarly journals Valuing Unpaid Care Work in Bhutan

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jooyeoun Suh ◽  
Changa Dorji ◽  
Valerie Mercer-Blackman ◽  
Aimee Hampel-Milagrosa
Keyword(s):  
National Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unpaid Work ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Gross National Happiness ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Societal Welfare ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
The Government

A growing body of scholarly literature has attempted to measure and value unpaid care work in various countries, but perhaps only the government statistical agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom have seriously undertaken periodic and systematic measures of the time spent on unpaid work at the national level, and partially incorporated those values into their gross domestic product(GDP). One country that has been ahead of its time on aspects of societal welfare measurement is Bhutan, which produces the Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index. However, until the first GNH Survey, in 2008, Bhutan did not have any sense of the size and distribution of unpaid work, despite its strong societal norms about the value of volunteering and community work. This paper is the first to estimate the value of unpaid care work in Bhutan. It shows the pros and cons of various approaches and their equivalent measures of unpaid care work as a share of GDP. As with similar studies on the topic, this paper also finds that women spend more than twice as much time as men performing unpaid care work, regardless of their income, age, residency, or number of people in the household. The paper also provides recommendations for improving the measurement of unpaid care work in Bhutan.

The Paid and Unpaid Working Life Expectancy at 50 in Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariane Ophir
Keyword(s):  
Life Expectancy ◽  
Family Caregiving ◽  
Population Aging ◽  
Family Care ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Unpaid Work ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Older Adulthood ◽  
Paid And Unpaid Work

Abstract Objectives Amid growing concerns about the economic implications of population aging and the sustainability of older adults’ working life, unpaid family care work receives less attention despite its direct relevance to population aging. This paper systematically compares the paid and unpaid working life expectancy at age 50 to understand the overlap and trade-off between paid and unpaid work among older European adults. Method Using data from the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) with the Sullivan method, the paper presents gender differences across 17 countries in life expectancy at age 50 at various paid (employment) and unpaid (caregiving) role configurations. Results When work is defined to include unpaid family caregiving, women and men have similar working life expectancies at age 50, in contrast to prior research. However, its paid and unpaid components are gendered. The results also show that at age 50, women are expected to spend similar number of years providing grandchild care and ADL/IADL care and that most of these years take place after retirement. Discussion The results highlight that the gendered tension between paid and unpaid work persists into older adulthood and needs to be accounted for in working life expectancy measures. The results also underscore the gendered implications of population aging and unpaid work in older adulthood for retirement age policies and strategies for promoting gender equality in later life.

scholarly journals INTERSECTIONAL GRIEVANCES IN CARE WORK: FRAMING INEQUALITIES OF GENDER, CLASS AND CASTE*

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Preethi Krishnan
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
The State ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Public Provision ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Childcare Workers ◽  
Provision Of Care ◽  
Low Wages

How do social movements include or exclude intersectional grievances of individual participants? What do variations in framing within the movement tell us about including intersectional grievances? I address these questions by examining frames deployed by anganwadi (childcare) workers in India and their organized union’s documented demands. I utilize a systemic intersectional approach to examine two specific grievances—low wages and weakening of public provision of care—that lie at the intersection of gender, caste, class, and care work. Workers use intersectional frames to interpret grievances, as they experience intersectional inequalities of gender, caste, and class. Findings show that the union targets the state alone while workers target both state and society. As intersectional grievances are durable inequalities that traverse across the boundaries of state and society, social movement frames may need a broader prognosis that targets both state and society to include intersectional grievances.

How the type of working day affects work–life balance and mealtime balance: A study based on the time use survey

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 1082-1103
Author(s):  
Ángel Alonso-Domínguez ◽  
Javier Callejo ◽  
Cecilia Díaz-Méndez
Keyword(s):  
Time Use ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Family Care ◽  
Work And Family ◽  
Unpaid Work ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Time Use Survey ◽  
Working Day ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Paid And Unpaid Work

How people balance work and personal or family life has been widely examined, showing gender inequalities that put women at a disadvantage relative to men. However, although this is a question of time compatibility, there has been no research on whether the type of working day (continuous or split) has different effects on this balance for men and women. The Time Use Survey enables us to examine this balance in two areas that are key to understanding the difficulty of reconciling timetables. On the one hand, there is the relationship between the type of working day and housework or family care (balance between paid and unpaid work). On the other hand, there is the relationship between the type of working day and eating (mealtime balance). The data indicate that the type of working day affects the balance between paid and unpaid work less than might be expected, since in all cases, it is women who do more unpaid work, while men’s involvement in housework changes little, whether they have a continuous or a split working day. However, the continuous working day is more favourable to balancing work and family life. In contrast, work–mealtime balance is a cultural feature that equalises both sexes in relation to an established habit that encourages sharing time outside work. We can thus speak of shared (non-work) time and unshared (unpaid) work.

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