How to achieve a satisfactory balance between work and family

Prof. Kovacheva from the Plovdiv University gave her policy recommendations on the balance between work and family at CINEFOGO’s first final conference in Brussels 17-18 March 2009.

Achieving a satisfactory balance between employment and parenthood has become problematic across Europe under conditions of global competition and persistent assumptions about ideal workers fully devoted to their work and having no family or other care responsibilities.
When giving policy reccommendations in changing European societies you have to take different historical, economic, policy and cultural contexts into account. Nevertheless, Prof. Kovacheva emphasized following overall policy recommendations for national and European actors:

European and national policy makers have to consider work-life balance as not only paid work and family care but also as varied forms of volunteerism. She explained how civic activities play an important part of balance between time and efforts devoted to different spheres of life. In the same way the definition of citizenship as a set of social rights should include all kinds of works such as business organizations, households and civil society associations.

Moreover, she mentioned that European policy measures should include not only globalisation processes but also quality of life issues since illimited increase of work under global pressures may in the very end ignore the employees’ needs.

Besides policy programmes, there is a need for policy campaigns targeting national and organizational cultures and the assumptions about ‘ideal’ workers as well as ‘proper’ male and female work and ‘proper’ male and female parenthood.

Finally, she noted that national state policies should be flexible which will require the involvement of many actors - policy makers, employers, trade unions, community and parents organisation - in designing, implementing and monitoring the measures.


Working paper and presentation are available to download from the CINEFOGO database:
http://cinefogo.cuni.cz/index.php?&id_result=28293&l=0&w=15&id_out=771


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Scientific Communications officer Ellen-Kristina Kristensen
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