Making Time: Organized Labour and the Politics of Care Leave

Projektbeschreibung

Wie Gewerkschaften die Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Privatleben in Europa gestalten

Die Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Privatleben ist in Europa nach wie vor uneinheitlich geregelt. Die Förderung von Zeit für Familie und Selbstfürsorge ist der Schlüssel zu nachhaltigem Arbeiten, dies hängt jedoch wiederum von der Verfügbarkeit von Urlaubsregelungen ab. Das ERC-finanzierte Projekt MakingTime soll untersuchen, wie Gewerkschaften die nationalen Urlaubsregelungen beeinflussen, von der Kinderbetreuung über die Betreuung älterer Menschen bis hin zum Krankheitsurlaub. Auf der Grundlage jahrzehntelanger quantitativer Analysen und eingehender Fallstudien untersucht das Projekt die gewerkschaftliche Interessenvertretung, Darstellung und politischen Mechanismen. Durch die Einbindung von vergleichender Forschung im Bereich von Politik und sozialer Bewegung wird MakingTime neue Daten und Erkenntnisse darüber liefern, wie die Arbeitsorganisation zum Aufbau eines nachhaltigen Arbeitsumfelds und einer fairen Sozialpolitik beitragen kann, um in Zukunft eine bessere Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Privatleben zu erreichen.

Ziel

Promoting work-life balance has been a focus of recent directives from the European Commission and a source of policy innovation in several countries. Social policies that make time for family and self-care are important tools for building sustainable work, but countries vary considerably in the extent to which such tools are available. Trade union organizations may play an important role for developing statutory care-related leave rights and protections, particularly as women still provide a bulk of family caregiving and now constitute a majority or near-majority of union members in many countries.

This project will use a novel mixed-method design to investigate organized labour’s relationships to national leave policies that grant time-off from work to address care needs, including leave to care for a child, aging parent, or ill spouse or to address self-care needs through sick leave or disability benefits. Quantitative analyses will examine union-policy relationships across rich democracies starting in 1965, and qualitative analyses will examine organized labour’s policy advocacy in Ireland, France and the Netherlands. Analyses of predictors will distinguish between different types of social provisions, consider differences in trade unions and the types of workers they represent, investigate the mechanisms of potential union influence over policy, and compare union-policy relationships across different institutional contexts.

A central ambition is to integrate the interdisciplinary fields of comparative policy analysis and social movement research to advance comparative labour studies and develop new theories of union-policy relationships. The project will additionally develop data infrastructures, offering much-needed longitudinal, comparative data on different types of care leave provisions. Overall, the project will assess the extent to which organized labour can be a partner for developing social policies that promote sustainable work for the future.