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Labour Market Protection across Space and Time: a Revised Typology and a Taxonomy of Countries’ Trajectories of Change

by Federico Danilo Filetti and Emanuele Ferragina

Over the last decades, labour market protection in high-income countries underwent severe processes of change. Labour market liberalization first unfolded in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1980s and served as a blueprint for reforms successively implemented in Europe since the 1990s. These processes of reform accelerated as a consequence of European integration and the Great Recession in the 2000s. Labour market protection has been predominantly reformed through the deregulation of employment protection, the weakening of collective bargaining institutions and the recalibration of compensatory benefits (i.e., unemployment benefits and minimum income schemes). Contextually, the reception of compensatory benefits has been increasingly conditioned to the participation to active labour market programmes. Moving from this context, our study provides a map of labour market protection generosity and change since the 1990s in 21 high-income countries.

Shared leave, happier parent couples? Parental leave and relationship satisfaction in Germany

by Janna Wilhelm and Pia S. Schober

After the transition to parenthood and while children are young, couples’ relationship quality tends to decline. Recent conceptualisations of the stalled gender revolution have argued that gender inequality in the division of paid and domestic work within heterosexual couples are likely to contribute to declining relationship satisfaction, especially among women. At the same time, institutions have been pointed out as crucial in supporting the diffusion of gender egalitarian norms in order to move towards completing the gender revolution – which then might affect relationship satisfaction positively. In line with this argument, it has been shown across different countries that parents’ individual happiness heavily depends on the availability and generosity of parental leave policies. Also, leave policies that incentivise fathers’ uptake of leave and support mothers’ labour market return have been found to promote a more equal division of childcare and paid work and might thus play a particularly important role.

How wealth matters for social policy. Introducing the Journal of European Social Policy special issue on social policy and wealth

by Ive Marx and Brian Nolan

Much of the rapidly growing scholarship on wealth understandably focuses on the top because that is where the bulk of wealth is held. This is true even in countries with comparatively equal income distributions and extensively redistributive welfare states. Yet even if assets are concentrated among the wealthy, they also matter a great deal for people who are less well off. Some people who are identified as poor or financially needy purely on the basis of income have meaningful assets, but many do not. Whether they have any such assets, or stand to inherit them in the future, can make a critical difference.

The 2021 special issue of the Journal of European Social Policy looks at how wealth matters for social policy scholarship. All the articles included in the special issue shed an innovative light on wealth in relation to a range of topics relevant for social policy researchers.

From Kafka to Kafka: EU Citizenship and National Welfare Bureaucracies

by Dion Kramer and Anita Heindlmaier

Conceived in Maastricht almost thirty years ago, EU citizenship was initially thought of as a mere symbolic addition to existing rights. In the following decades, interventions by the European Court of Justice led many to believe that EU citizenship could emerge as a truly fundamental status capable of conferring concrete social rights to EU citizens crossing borders within the European Union. This promise of a social citizenship beyond the nation-state is currently less tenable. The aftermath of the Great Recession and Brexit have shown the limits of EU citizenship as a status delivering to those most in need of its protection.

Care loops and everyday mobilities in pandemic times

by Lise Widding Isaksen and Lena Näre

The Covid-19 pandemic made the socio-economic importance of care loops and everyday mobilities very visible. ‘Care loops’ is a concept coined to capture the routine, daily practices and micro-mobilities of care that create loops between the home, the workplace, places of child or elder care, schools, and leisure activities. In pandemic times, parents’ labour market participation and balancing of work and family were re-organized and privatized to contain the spreading of coronavirus. Consequently, boundaries between the private and the public became blurred, and new socio-spatial practices emerged.

Automation and workfare support

by Zhen Im and Kathrin Komp-Leukkunen

Do automation-threatened workers support workfare? As automation permeates the workplace, this question becomes increasingly relevant. Although automation-threatened workers prefer more generous income redistribution to compensate for potential economic loss, we know less about their views on workfare. This gap is concerning due to changes in social policy orientation among European governments under the pressure of fiscal austerity.

Elder care and paid work: Gender differences in the relationship between unpaid elder care work and employment in Bulgaria

by Mieke Meurs and Lisa Giddings

Covid-19 has shown a bright light on the unequal burden of care on women and the impact of this burden on women’s wellbeing. The increase in household work, childcare, homeschooling, and the care of older adults, which under normal circumstances is disproportionately born by women, has been exacerbated in the pandemic as “Covid took a crowbar into gender gaps and pried them open”. This is taking an economic and emotional toll. According to McKinsey Global Institute, women’s jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable in Covid-19 than men’s, and while women comprise 39 percent of global employment, but they account for 54 percent of job losses. Research in the United States showed that among mothers of children under 18 years of age, 57 percent are experiencing increased stress due to the coronavirus outbreak, compared 32 percent of fathers.

Female-breadwinner families on the breadline

By Helen Kowalewska and Agnese Vitali

Since the 1990s, there has been a rise in the number of households in which women are working more hours than their male partners across the UK and other advanced economies. Female breadwinners are often stereotyped as career-oriented, empowered, and high-earning women. However, our study suggests this is often not the case.