Work and Care under Pressure : Care Arrangements Across Europe [1 ed.] 9789048519163, 9789089645425

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Edited by Blanche Le Bihan, Claude Martin and Trudie Knijn

Work and Care under Pressure

Copyright © 2013. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Care Arrangements across Europe

A U P

Work and Care under Pressure : Care Arrangements Across Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2013. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Work and Care under Pressure

Work and Care under Pressure : Care Arrangements Across Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook

CARE & WELFARE Care and welfare are changing rapidly in contemporary welfare states. The Care & Welfare series publishes studies on changing relationships between citizens and professionals, on care and welfare governance, on identity politics in the context of these welfare state transformations, and on ethical topics. It will inspire international academic and political debate by developing and reflecting upon theories of (health) care and welfare through detailed national case studies and/or international comparisons. This series will offer new insights into the interdisciplinary theory of care and welfare and its practices.

series editors

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Jan Willem Duyvendak, University of Amsterdam Trudie Knijn, Utrecht University Monique Kremer, Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy (Wetenschappelijke Raad voor het Regeringsbeleid – wrr) Margo Trappenburg, Utrecht University

Work and Care under Pressure : Care Arrangements Across Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook

Work and Care under Pressure Care Arrangements across Europe

Copyright © 2013. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Edited by Blanche Le Bihan Claude Martin Trudie Knijn

Work and Care under Pressure : Care Arrangements Across Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook

Cover image: Sabine Joosten / Hollandse Hoogte Cover design: Sabine Mannel, neon graphic design company, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam

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© Blanche Le Bihan, Claude Martin & Trudie Knijn / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

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Table of contents

1

Introduction Workers under pressure and social care arrangements A research framework Trudie Knijn, Claude Martin and Blanche Le Bihan

2

Work-family balance in the Netherlands Work and care culture mediating between institutions and practices Trudie Knijn and Barbara Da Roit

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Negotiating gender equality, atypical work hours and caring responsibilities The case of Sweden Sofia Björk, Ulla Björnberg and Hans Ekbrand

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Caregiving and paid work in Germany The impact of social inequality Wolfgang Keck, Christina Klenner, Sabine Neukirch and Chiara Saraceno

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Working caregivers ‘living under pressure’ in France Blanche Le Bihan, Claude Martin and Arnaud Campéon

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Negotiating work and care in a changing welfare regime The case of Portugal Karin Wall, Sanda Samitca and Sónia Correia

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Blurring boundaries and clashing loyalties Working and caring in Italy Manuela Naldini, Elisabetta Donati and Barbara Da Roit

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The changing mix of care in six European countries Manuella Naldini, Karin Wall and Blanche Le Bihan

171

About the Contributors

195

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1 Introduction Workers under pressure and social care arrangements: A research framework

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Trudie Knijn, Claude Martin and Blanche Le Bihan

Reconciling work and family life – or reaching a work-family balance, as it has been called recently in the literature (Guest 2002; Frone 2003; Abigail & Milner 2003; Hantrais & Ackers 2005; Van der Lippe, Jager & Kops 2006; Van der Lippe & Peters 2007; Lewis 2009a; Hobson 2011) – is at the core of Europe’s social policy agenda as well as that of many of its member states. It has also been the subject of (comparative) academic research ever since the 1970s. For much of the last four decennia, the focus of social policies (and of many academic studies) has been on the way in which gender inequality – expressed in women’s family care responsibilities – has restricted the full participation of women in the labour market, their career perspectives, their (economic) autonomy and independence, their social participation and their self-development. Recently, a turning point has been reached in that the lens is now also being directed at the effects of employment on gender-equal family life. This approach can be ascribed to three parallel developments. First, in many countries, the majority of women (with or without dependent family members) are in paid employment, although not always and everywhere in full-time jobs (OECD Employment Outlook 2012). Second, the post-industrial labour market – with its irregular working times, precarious and flexible jobs, and increasing productivity – is influencing family life in an unforeseen way (Guest 2002; Drobnic & Guillén 2011). Third, evaluations of the diversification of care arrangements (via the state, the market, taxation systems, etc.) make it clear that the family will remain the last resort when it comes to care work (Leira & Saraceno 2002; Gerhard, Knijn & Weckwert 2005; Da Roit 2010). The perspective that until recently had been dominant – that public care should fully substitute for mainly women’s family care – has been recognised as unrealistic and even undesirable. Although men’s contribution to family care work has been increasing, it still lags far behind women’s share in family care work. Therefore the focus has shifted to the dual aims of protecting some time for caring for family members and of reaching a genderequal sharing of work and care (Knijn & Kremer 1997; Lewis 2009a). This book reflects these current trends, focusing in a detailed and balanced way on how people – mainly women – in six European countries (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden) deal 7

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with care responsibilities for their children and for their elderly parents while confronted with employment conditions that are neither secure nor foreseeable. It focuses on the effects of insufficient care provision on women’s relation with the labour market as well as on family life and on employment in a flexible and fluid labour market in productivity-oriented economic conditions. The intention is to explore and understand, by way of national case studies, how family members envisage and deal with combining the demands of (nearly or more than) full-time jobs, shift work, and precarious and flexible work schemes with caring for dependent and vulnerable family members.1 How do post-industrial female and male workers balance their work and their family lives? More specifically, this book aims to answer the following three questions: 1) How do women (and men) in various European welfare states cope with balancing their work and their family lives in a context in which their working conditions and family arrangements have become increasingly complex; 2) How do social policies, labour market regulations, workplace conditions and care facilities enable or impede their attempts to achieve a satisfying balance between work and family life; and 3) What defines differences in intergenerational care work for children and frail elderly parents – i.e., in what way do conditions (i.e., workplace and care facilities, family-related care cultures) for coping with childcare differ from conditions for coping with care for frail elderly family members? The relationship between private task divisions and employment and the trade-offs involved are still characterised by gender segregation in the labour market, as lower wages and the limited career perspectives of women in the labour market influence decisions on how private tasks are delegated among family members and vice versa. On the one hand, women’s employment rates in all European countries have increased in the last decades of the twentieth century as men have taken on a larger share of what has been called ‘women’s tasks’; public services for childcare have expanded in most European welfare states; and provisions for combining work and care have been central to policy agendas at both the European Union and the member state levels. On the other hand, new employment patterns today – such as long working hours and flexible working hours, temporary work and shift work – influence the way in which (mainly) women cope with combining care for children and for frail elderly parents. Women have to cope with these caring tasks in a context of flexible labour markets and fluid family lives caused by increasing rates of divorce and cohabitation, growing numbers of children born out of wedlock and to single-parent families, and a family structure that tends to be vertical (intergenerational) rather than horizontal (intragenerational) (Saraceno 2008; Kotowska 2012; Dykstra 2012). As a result, the way in which women deal with family life and employment is dynamic and is related to developments in the labour market and in family life – in the context of family policy, care work and labour market regulations, workplace culture, and interpretations of the meaning of fa-

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mily care. Each of these circumstances has changed the work-life balance in European countries in recent decades. Below, we summarise the main aspects of the framework that inspired the national case studies presented in the following chapters. First, we focus on the difference between caring for children and caring for frail elderly relatives and on intergenerational features of the relationship between adult children and their parents, as well as between parents and their children. We also examine the cultural interpretation of these relationships, which defines the sense of responsibility and the way in which care work can be managed. The latter is also influenced by social policy. Our second task is to map out care-related options for participating in the post-industrial labour market and work-related options for family care. We also outline the employment patterns and labour market participation in the six countries under study. Work-life balance conditions are influenced by national and EU social policies, resulting in fairly diverse coping strategies being applied by women in the six countries examined in this book. Third, we explore coping strategies that might be used by the respondents represented in the case studies in this book. Finally, we outline the book’s research framework and methodological strategy.

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1

Care for children or frail elderly people

Children require a different kind of caretaking than elderly relatives (parents or parents-in-law). These differences have to do with planning, perspective and the hierarchical relationships between the generations. With regard to planning, most parents will have made a conscious and even planned choice to have children. They may have given thought to how they would cope with combining work and care (even if outcomes may be inconclusive or unsatisfying); they have considered options for the division of care (leave, formal and/or informal childcare, grandparents) and have probably also calculated the costs of having children and whether they could afford to have them. In spite of the exceptions (teenage mothers and mothers who desert their newborns), the vast majority of European children are born because their parents have made a conscious decision and concluded that they were ready to become parents. In contrast, care for frail elderly parents is neither planned nor the result of considered action by their adult children. Older parents simply become dependent. It might happen suddenly or slowly, at any age; it might be caused by mental or physical problems; and it is rarely predictable. With regard to perspective, the development of children’s dependency is more predictable than the development of older people’s dependency. The perspective on how children develop is, in general, fairly clear: step by step they become more autonomous, independent and self-conscious.

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By contrast, there is no such perspective for frail elderly people. Instead, their dependency seldom results in recovery, and even if their health does stabilise for a while, they will steadily need more care and attention. The moment of transition to a higher degree of dependency can hardly be foreseen, and neither the frail elderly themselves nor their adult children can anticipate it. There comes a day when it has to be acknowledged and adult children have to cope with it. One major difference between caring for children and caring for one’s frail elderly parents is intergenerational hierarchy. Whereas parents are by definition – by law and because of their position and age – the responsible authorities in relation to the immature children they care for, the hierarchical relationship between adult children and the elderly parents they care for is much more complicated. First, throughout their lives these children have had no say in their parents’ lives. Instead, they grew up under the responsibility and authority of their parents, with this relationship gradually transitioning into one of equals (more or less) during their adult lives. And now, at the end of their parents’ lives, they have to cope with a situation of reversed dependency. Second, adult children tend to be sensitive to their parents’ wishes and feelings, hesitating to quarrel with their parents. Some reasons for this might be respect for their parents, feelings of guilt, or simply the still-present fear of their parents’ anger. Third, regardless of how frail and dependent elderly parents are, they have their own opinions on what they need, like and want in a given situation and might not accept their children’s advice, even if it is based on what the children refer to as their ‘best interests’. Fourth, adult children usually have no legal authority over their parents and are therefore unable to act against their will. Finally, the transformation of adult children into ‘a semi-parental role’ for their own care-dependent parents, as Saraceno (2008) calls it, redefines the ‘boundaries of intimacy that are deeply entrenched in intergenerational roles, and more generally may entail a symbolic realignment of memories and emotional biographies’ (ibid: 8). None of these aspects arise in the caretaking of one’s own children. Because the planning, perspective and intergenerational hierarchy are very different in relationships between parents and young children and between adult children and their dependent elderly parents, the relational, emotional and social character of each type of caregiving differs. In addition, the conditions and resources for both types of caregiving vary, since caring for children and caring for elderly parents are facilitated in different ways by care-related social policies and work regulations in European welfare states. Hence, the way in which parents and adult children perform their caregiving work also depends on how intergenerational care is facilitated or restricted in their respective countries.

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2 Care packaging: different ‘patchworks’ for children and frail elderly people There are also similarities between caring for elderly parents and caring for children. The degree of dependency – related to the age of the children or the health of the parents – is more of a determining factor than intergenerational hierarchy in deciding the degree of emotional attention, feeding and nurturing, clothing and cleaning needed. Moreover, all aspects of care work have to be organised, thought about and shared with loyal, trustworthy people – either in the intimacy of private family life or in an institutional context. The concept of care-packaging (Knijn, Jönsson & Klammer 2005), which goes back to Balbo’s ‘quilting or patchwork’ care (1987), is most relevant here because it refers to the combination of all kinds of resources for care work that in the end must be integrated, monitored and organised by family members. Since Balbo’s publication in 1987, many changes have taken place in the care provision offered by European welfare states. Cash-for-care payments have been introduced, childcare facilities have been extended in almost all European countries, care leave has been introduced, care work has been valued in pension schemes, and the European Union has made parental leave compulsory in its member states (Ungerson & Yeandle 2007; Lewis, Knijn, Martin & Ostner 2008; Daly 2011; Plantenga, Remery & Takacs 2012). Nevertheless, huge differences persist in welfare state contributions to care work. Sweden, for instance, spent 2.3 per cent of its GDP on elderly care in 2008. By contrast, the other five continental European countries surveyed in this study spent a maximum of 0.7 per cent (the Netherlands) to elderly care: France contributed 0.4 per cent, Portugal 0.3 per cent, Germany 0.2 per cent and Italy only 0.1 per cent of their respective GDPs to elderly care (Eurostat 2010, online data code: tsdde530). Such expenditure data more or less indicate the level of generosity in the kind of care provided. The low spending on elderly care in Italy, Portugal and Germany is reflected in the percentage of persons aged 65+ in residential care facilities (2, 3.4 and 3.7 per cent respectively); at the higher end, Sweden, France and the Netherlands offer residential care to 5.9, 6.7 and 6.9 per cent respectively of their citizens above the age of 65 (OECD Health Data 2010; for Italy: ISTAD 2010b; for Portugal, see chapter 6). Expenditure on childcare (services and allowances) also varies widely, with Germany and Sweden each spending 3.1 per cent, and France, Portugal, the Netherlands and Italy spending 2.6, 1.5, 1.3 and 1.0 per cent respectively in 2006 (European Parliament 2006; Da Roit & Sabatinelli 2007; Martin 2010).We should not forget the extent to which these estimates can vary depending on the perimeter of definition we adopt for childcare policies and, in particular, depending on whether or not preschool costs are included (Scheiwe & Willekens 2009). Given the wide range and variety of care policies for elderly people and children in the

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six countries in this study, we have summarised some of the main characteristics of these countries’ care policies in Table 1.1. The table outlines: a) financially compensated care services (residential/institutional); b) financially compensated professional care work; c) cash-for-care schemes; and d) paid leave. Table 1.1 Care services, professional care work, cash-for-care and care leave France

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Germany

12

Elderly care a) Residential care for elderly people; coverage: 6.7% of persons > 65. b) Home nursing services-medical (Allocation personnalisée d’autonomie). c) Benefit for social and personal care (Allocation personnalisée d’autonomie). d) Familial solidarity leave to accompany a dying relative. Three months, renewable once. Unpaid. e) Short paid leave fixed at €47/day for three weeks to care for a dying relative (three weeks only). Introduced in 2009.

Childcare a) Crèches for children under three and daycare centres for older children on Wednesdays. b) Cash benefits for qualified childminders for children under the age of three since the 1980s. c) PAJE: Prestation d’accueil du jeune enfant, composed of different elements: a universal basic allowance up to the third birthday of the child, a complement du mode de garde (CMG) for the parents of children under the age of six who want to work and the complement de libre choix d’activité CLCA, parental leave for parents who want to reduce/stop their employment to care for their children up to their third birthday (also possible part-time). a) Residential care for elderly people; a) Right to a (part-time) childcare coverage: 3.7% of 65+ population. Co- place. payment for five days a week; can be d) Legal right to maternity leave (14 more than 1,000 euros per month. weeks) plus two years of parental b) Benefits for long-term care (insur- leave; the latter is paid for 12 months ance-based). (or an equivalent) at 67% of the usual c) Unpaid six-month care leave for a wage (maximum 1800 euros). Fathers dying elderly parent. can take up two months, but if they don’t, the two months are not deducted. Right to request part-time work but the right to return to work is guaranteed only for full-time workers.

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Italy

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Netherlands

Elderly care a) Residential care for elderly people (expensive); coverage: 2% of 65+ population. b) Home care services that reach 34% of 65+ population; healthcare domiciliary services (a broader audience restricted to very specific tasks). c) Cash allowance (indennità di accompagnamento) for disabled and/or older people. Beneficiaries must be 100% disabled and in need of constant care. d) Three days of paid leave per month for care of a severely disabled person. The health commission must certify that the person is 100% disabled. a) Residential care for elderly people; coverage: 6.9% of 65+ population (almost all costs publicly covered). b) Home care and home nursing services via compulsory insurance paid by employers’ and employees’ premiums. c) Cash-for-care (personal budget) to care for disabled children and dependent family members via compulsory insurance paid by employers’ and employees’ premiums. d) Emergency leave for unexpected personal family problems (one day fully paid); ten days' leave per year to take care of a relative where the person is the main caregiver. Paid 70% of salary; long-term care leave to take care of a very sick close relative (child, parent) (for a maximum period of six times the weekly working hours for a period of 12 weeks, the employee is allowed to work no more than half the number of hours he/she would normally work).

Childcare a) Childcare facilities (limited for children under the age of three); universal preschool facilities (age category: 3-6). d) Compulsory maternity leave (five months at 80% of last earned wage); parental leave at replacement rate of 30% of the wage for a maximum of six months taken within three years of the child’s birth. Plus a ‘take it or lose it’ father’s quota.

a) Childcare facilities (commercially provided) available for children under school age (coverage rate: 33%), parental costs reimbursed by incomerelated tax reductions; full-time (10hour) school day in all primary schools with obligatory pre- and afterschool services. d) Short (16 weeks), fully paid maternity leave; parental leave (low paid: 50% of the minimum wage per hour of leave, with a maximum ceiling of 690 euros per month); length: 50% of the previous working week for a period of 52 weeks. Emergency leave (one day fully paid); long-term care leave (for a maximum period of six times the weekly working hours for a period of 12 weeks, the employee is allowed to work no more than half the number of hours he/she would normally work).

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Portugal

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Sweden

Elderly care a) Residential care for elderly people; coverage: 3.4% of 65+ population. b) Home care services (universal, publicly subsidised and offered by non-profit care providers). Payments according to income; only very low-income families (below the minimum national wage of 485 euros in 2011) are entitled to free services. c) Cash-for-care schemes; a low, flatrate benefit per child or dependent elderly person needing care provided by a third person. d) 15 days to care for a sick adult relative.

Childcare a) Childcare services (hybrid: private non-profit, public and private profitmaking services) with 47% of 0-2 year olds enrolled; full-time (8-hour) school day in all primary schools, with obligatory pre- and after-school services. d) Parental leave based on individual entitlement; paid paternity leave (four weeks with a bonus month for fathers); parents can take up to six months of well-paid leave (at 100% of previous earnings); the right to miss work for 30 days to care for a sick child; parental entitlement to a twohour work reduction during the first year of the child’s life. a) Residential care for elderly people; a) Universal childcare; municipalities coverage: 5.9% of 65+ population. are obliged to provide childcare b) Publicly financed (an income-reservices (pre-schools). Coverage lated fee determined by the municirates in 2009: 79% of all children palities up to a maximum limit set by aged one to three and 98% of all the government); tax deductions to children aged four to five were secure care provision for individuals enrolled in formal childcare. through the market. b) Childminders’ subsidies granted d)Leave: two months to care for a dy- by municipalities (to purchase care ing relative, with 80% of salary paid. from private providers, or to provide care oneself when the child is not enrolled in public childcare). The allowance is approximately 300 euros per month per child before taxes. d) Legal right to 14 weeks of maternity leave and two weeks of paternity leave. Parental leave is guaranteed for every qualifying employee for 18 months, of which 480 days are paid. Parents are allowed to reduce their working hours by 25% until the child is eight. Qualifying parents receive 80% of their usual wage with an extra bonus for fathers who take leave. The right to return to work is guaranteed unless parents take up more than 18 months of leave.

Source: Data collected by the WOUPS research team

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In spite of all these facilities, supported by cash-for-care schemes and legal rights to (paid) leave, family care still makes up the largest part of all care work, even in those countries that have well-developed public care facilities. As can be concluded from this overview, European countries differ considerably in the way they provide, facilitate and subsidise provisions for the two categories of dependent family members. As a result, the way in which intergenerational care is packaged differs both by country and within countries, between the two categories of caregivers (parents and adult children) as well as between localities (since local inequalities also exist in terms of the level and availability of services). In addition, the care package depends – aside from culturally defined care traditions and the quality assessment of care provisions – on family income and working times. This study mainly focuses on the relationship between working times and care packages. Only a very small minority of elderly parents of adult children are cared for in residential elderly homes; the vast majority are cared for by a combination of professional care services, paid or unpaid informal caregivers, and (several) adult children who must combine this care work with their jobs. A central question in this book is what role current macro-level care policies and financial compensations for family care play in determining what kind of ‘care packages’ are arranged, and in what way these allow (female) family caregivers to keep their jobs and reach a manageable and satisfying work-life balance. Clearly, 24/7 residential care for children and elderly parents offers workers the best solution for participation in the labour market. Although such care provision does exist – for instance, at a Toyota childcare centre in the US – it barely contributes to a satisfactory work-life balance. Also, the full outsourcing of care to private (migrant) childminders or care workers only benefits participation in the labour market without contributing to satisfying family relationships (Da Roit 2010; Hochschild 2012). At the same time, research has shown that intergenerational relationships prove more satisfying if only part of the full burden of care for frail elderly parents falls on the shoulders of adult children. Scandinavian elderly people are much more content with the relationship with their children, who spend far less time with their parents than their Italian counterparts, than Italian elderly people are. Reverse dependency is not exactly what older parents desire in their relationship with their adult children (Knijn & Komter 2004; Ostner 2004), and in some countries such as the Netherlands or France, elderly people are very outspoken about their refusal to become dependent on their children – which sometimes prompts them to take out private insurance policies against dependency, as in the French case (Da Roit 2010; Le Bihan & Martin 2010). So neither extreme – full public or full private care – appears to be in line with what dependent elderly people and their adult children long for, and the same goes for parents of young children. Considering the

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complementarity of these private and public resources, the question is therefore what kind of care package is most satisfying given the working conditions of the family caregivers. Such a perspective raises the question of the caregiver’s point of view on their care arrangements in terms of satisfaction, preference, pressure or burden, etc. Interestingly, as the case studies in this volume show, there is no straightforward relationship between the care package offered at the macro-level of the welfare state and the individual care package of women who care for children or frail elderly parents. Some care policies to date offer choices for care work performed by either family members or professional careworkers. In many countries, cash-for-care payments can be used for either in-family care or external, professional care, leaving the decision to family members as to which kind of care they prefer. However, the options are never income-neutral or gender-neutral and may have consequences for employment perspectives. The same goes for paid parental leave: while on the one hand it compensates for the income loss of the caring parent/ mother, on the other hand it downgrades her employability. For that reason, many family care workers strive for an optimal care package combining some paid or unpaid family care with some public and/or paidfor professional care services that are assumed to be qualitatively guaranteed and fit the family care workers’ employment demands. The question then becomes: what is the optimal combination of resources in terms of care arrangements? The following chapters focus on the considerations these caregivers take into account and the decisions they make, given their constraints and employment patterns. Will they outsource care work as much as possible because they can afford to or because they have to? Will they package as many care resources as they can to optimise their income position or will they prioritise all kinds of family-related care resources because of moral obligations, gendered patterns of care and the implicit or explicit expectations of significant others? Are they free to choose the care package they prefer or are they trapped between working demands and the lack of suitable care facilities? Do these combinations vary substantially depending on the country? Care packaging relates to care policies, the most dynamic of all current social policies. Demographic changes, the rising dependency ratio, pension costs and the costs of elderly care are resulting in an intensive political debate on family and care policy. Hence, continual and successive reforms are challenging the boundaries of public versus private responsibilities, enforcing the marketisation and commodification of care services, and commodifying or facilitating the outsourcing of family care. Reforms are inspired by a wide amalgam of political ideologies – neoliberal, communitarian or social-democratic – and while certain reforms contribute to de-familialising care, others conversely re-familialise it. No matter what the political ideologies behind these reforms are, such rapid transformations inevitably contribute to insecurity about future arrange-

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ments, raising questions about the reliability and accessibility of public provisions. Such uncertainties are expressed by Swedish adult caregivers, who are experiencing the increasing privatisation of elderly care; by French caregivers, who are preoccupied by the policy intention to resort to private insurance policies to complement the long-term care system as regularly proclaimed by politicians and decision-makers; by Italian daughters, who are uncertain about the cash-for-care schemes they use to pay the migrant women caring for their dependent elderly parents; and by Dutch parents of young children who experience continual reforms in parental leave schemes and variations in required private versus public childcare costs.

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3 Changing labour markets and work-related options for care work All over Europe, labour markets are in flux; the post-war working week – initially six days but reduced to only five days from the 1960s – and the regulated daily hours of the Fordist industrial working patterns no longer hold for the majority of the workforce. Only a small minority of the European population now works in agriculture, and industrial work is being rapidly replaced by post-industrial work in banking, insurance, police and security services, hospitality and tourism, (health)care, education, design, management, the arts and transport. Jobs in these kinds of sectors tend to demand 24/7 work-shifts and are neither time- nor placebound, and may have to be performed at what were previously considered irregular working hours. During the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial labour market, large numbers of women entered deregulated post-industrial jobs that offered both opportunities and challenges for family life and care (Lewis & Den Dulk, 2008; Lewis 2009b). And it is precisely because of this deregulation of working times and related protection schemes that it is hard to pin down how the labour market has evolved in terms of flexibility and atypical working timetables in the countries we looked at. There are variations between countries in terms of labour market characteristics, the number of part-time, flexible (and therefore precarious) jobs and the percentage of self-employed workers. The 2012 OECD Employment Outlook shows that in the countries we are concerned with, average annual working hours per worker vary from fewer than 1400 in Germany to almost 1800 in Italy, which means that German employees work 25 per cent fewer hours per year than their Italian counterparts. It is striking that in Italy only 57 per cent of the working age population is employed, as compared with 71 per cent of the German working population. Putting these two statistics together, we can conclude that the German population does not work less than the Italian population, it is rather that Germany has divided the working hours

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among its workforce better than Italy. Gender differences in labour participation are also the highest in Italy (of the six countries we are comparing), where it is still the case that less than half of the female population is included in the labour market – 11 percentage points below the overall employment rates. In all the other countries we are concerned with, women’s employment is, at most, 5 percentage points below the overall participation rates. There are also interesting differences in terms of part-time employment, which stands at almost 40 per cent in the Netherlands – but is virtually non-existent in Portugal (less than 10 per cent). Finally, the prevalence of temporary work appears to have been fairly stable since 2000 in most of the six countries – with the exception of the Netherlands, where there was an increase in temporary work from 14 per cent in 2000 to 18.5 per cent in 2010. This means that almost one-fifth of the working population in the Netherlands is employed in a non-permanent job; in Portugal, this figure even reaches 23 per cent. Table 1.2 Labour market participation and working hours (2010) Employment rates (% of working age population) France 64 Germany 71 Italy 57 Netherlands 75 Portugal 66 Sweden 73

Women % Part-time % Temporary Average annual employed employment employment working hours (% of female per worker population 15-64) 60 13.6 15.1 1554 (2009) 66 21.7 14.7 1419 46 16.3 12.8 1778 70 37.1 18.5 1377 61 9.3 23 1714 70 14 15.8 1624

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Source: OECD Employment Outlook 2012

For an evaluation of the influence of (changing) work conditions on the work-life balance of men and women, Mustomäki, Anttila, Oinas & Nätti (2011) analysed data from the European Working Conditions Survey (1995, 2000-2001, 2005) and detected an overall gender division in working conditions. Their findings on employee discretionary power (having influence on the daily organisation of work, the order and methods of work), long working hours, working at unsocial times (defined as working at least four Saturdays/Sundays or at least five nights per month) and job insecurity show interesting results. They conclude that, except in the Scandinavian countries, women have higher discretionary power at work than men. Although lower proportions of working men and women have high discretionary power in less affluent societies, the gender gap is the widest in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, whereas in Anglo-Saxon and Southern Europe, men and women report more equal levels of influence on their daily organisation of work (ibid: 31). In Anglo-

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Saxon countries in particular, but also in Continental and Eastern European countries, men’s influence on working hours and the organisation of their work has declined since 2000, and the same goes for women in Southern Europe. As might have been expected, men work long hours per week (48 hours or more) more often than women in all the countries included in this survey. The phenomenon of workers working non-standard hours increased in all six countries we surveyed, and this is slightly more common among men than among women. As many as one-third of all men and a quarter of all women worked non-standard working hours in 2005, except in Scandinavian countries, where less than 15 per cent of male and female workers work unsocial working hours (ibid.). Finally, there is a great deal of variation in the percentage of workers in temporary jobs in the six countries. Mustomäki et al. show that mainly women in Southern European countries work in temporary jobs, as do women in Scandinavian countries, but to a lesser extent. The variation in gendered labour market participation rates, average working hours of men and women, job discretionary power at work and job security in the six countries we studied does not in itself define the work-life balance of family members caring for both children and frail elderly relatives. Local working conditions, family and care policies, and culturally defined patterns of intergenerational and gender relations also determine the contexts in which male and female family members are able to cope with work and care demands for children and frail elderly parents. Working people with care responsibilities have to consider how to achieve the right work-life balance in the context of their working obligations, their chance to provide an income for the family, their work ambitions and work-related social policy and regulations. Working habits in their particular jobs and sectors also influence the options available to them in reaching a satisfying work-life balance. Fagan and Walthery (2011) distinguish four job characteristics that are assumed to cause tensions for individual workers and have a negative impact on their worklife balance. An initial source of such tensions is long working hours and non-standard working times – even more so where workers do not have control over their work schedules. Fagan and Walthery’s assumption is that the negative effects occur because this impairs the worker’s ‘ability to “switch off” and be emotionally available for involvement in personal life’ (ibid: 73). In addition, it might be assumed that long working hours and non-standard working times not controlled by employees are directly responsible for difficulties in planning because of the unpredictability of their availability for dependants in need of care. The second source of tensions distinguished by Fagan and Walthery concerns job demands. The pace and emotional and cognitive demands of one’s work can have either positive or negative effects on individually experienced tensions and the ability to reach a satisfactory work-life balance. A positive effect might be that the work compensates for the lack of

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cognitive demands that goes along with family care work. Performing emotional professional work might contribute to skills that can be used in private family care, and pace demands at work might be experienced as a welcome speeding up in contrast to the sometimes slow and boring time spent accompanying very young children or mentally disabled elderly parents. Negative effects might be caused by an overload of job demands, which cannot be compensated for because of a lack of private free time due to care responsibilities. A third source of tensions relates to job control, especially task autonomy, task flow, and time and place-related control. Each of these aspects of task control is assumed to influence work-related strains and therefore the experienced work-life balance. A central conclusion from the study is that: ‘reports of work-life balance are reduced by long, unsocial working hours and job demands (emotional labour and time pressures) while working time autonomy and job control (over the pace of work, and ask discretion) enhance the work-life balance of European employees’ (Fagan & Walthery 2011: 90). Social policy and collective work agreements contributing to a more satisfactory work-life balance have been on the policy agenda for some decades and, if applied well, these might offer family caregivers the resources they need to cope with long and/or unsocial working hours. Job demands and job control aspects in turn are not covered by collective agreements or social policy; they are at the discretion of companies, organisations and their managers. Work-related policies governed by social policy and collective work agreements include the right to part-time work and parental leave as well as social rights pertaining to part-time, flexible and precarious jobs. In spite of European guidelines for parental leave (Council Directive 1996) and recommendations and agendas for flexicurity (EC 2007), the way in which these are implemented (if at all) in member states varies a great deal. What is most striking is the difference between France, the Netherlands and Sweden – countries where the right to reduce working hours is regulated – and Italy, where such rights are absent. The social protection of employees working in precarious jobs also differs across Europe, varying from fairly robust protection in the Netherlands and Sweden to much weaker configurations in Portugal and Italy, with France and Germany positioned in the middle. However, whether or not collective agreements, rules and social policies are available, in the end, workplace culture and management discretion are decisive in workers’ ability to make use of these arrangements. As Den Dulk and colleagues have shown: ‘it is at the workplace and work-organisational level that formal work-life policies are converted into entitlements and claims, where requests are granted or denied’ (Den Dulk et al. 2011: 301). Whether or not to grant a request for a worklife arrangement may depend on fear of disrupting the department’s work, fear of losing a valued and hard-to-replace worker, or ethical considerations – with the latter argument based on the idea that supporting

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working parents is the morally correct thing to do (ibid.). In addition, findings in the banking sector in three European countries (the Netherlands, Slovenia and the UK) indicate that in all cases, deeply gendered assumptions are still common among banking sector managers, who frame work-life arrangements as being mainly a women’s issue (ibid.).

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3.1 Coping with care work and work under pressure Reaching a satisfying combination of caring for those one cares about and fulfilling the demands of one’s job is anything but an easy task. The concept of work-life balance is becoming popular as a positive way of expressing the aim of reconciling working life with family life in a gender-equal way. Yet at the same time, it implicitly gives voice to the tensions between working men and women because the reconciliation is hard to reach on a gender-equal basis. Theoretically, several approaches to the tensions between work and family life as well as between men and women can be distinguished. A long-used framework for explaining tension between these two domains is the ‘role strain’ theory (Goode 1960; French & Caplan 1972; Drobnic & Guillén 2011). This approach focuses primarily on the structural characteristics of both domains, assuming that work and family life are opposite life domains, each demanding different roles that are difficult to combine. The ‘role demands’ of these opposite domains are characterised by different obligations, qualities and skills. In addition, practical aspects – such as contradictory demands related to the place one needs to be at a certain moment, timing and attention – can hinder the combination of both roles. In line with this approach is the ‘coping theory’ (Lazarus & Folkman 1984) which indicates that people, as active agents, are able to cope with stressful life events or conflicting role demands in several ways. Weiten and Lloyd (2008) distinguish three strategies applied in managing circumstances or events experienced as burdensome. First, there are the ‘appraisal-focused coping strategies’ that are adaptive and cognitive. People deny the burden and/or reformulate and redefine the situation by altering their personal values and goals. Second, ‘problem-focused coping strategies’ adapt the conditions and circumstances that have brought about the problem. They try to alter conditions by searching for information and looking for alternative solutions. And third, ‘emotion-oriented coping strategies’ aim to manage feelings and mindsets in order to deal with negative experiences. People try to adjust mentally to what they experience as given and unchangeable life conditions. Another theory in line with the two previous ones has been elaborated around the notion of ‘quality of life and work’ (Bäck-Wiklund, Van der Lippe, den Bulk & Doorne-Huiskes, 2011; Drobnic & Guillén 2011). The core of the model is a ‘demands versus resources’ approach: ‘Both the workplace and the family or household situation generate demands and

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resources. Our basic assumption is that paid work contributes to people’s quality of life as long as their resources are adequate to meet the demands and needs they face … When resources lag behind the demands workers face in various life domains, tensions and feelings of stress may arise that in turn impact on their well-being’ (Bäck-Wiklund et al. 2011: 18). This perspective is still very much centred on resources to cope with the needs, putting aside the norms and expectations of the individuals. Indeed, important individual variations exist beside common apparent needs and constraints, depending on personal expectations and norms concerning the caring role. When applied to the two very different situations of working adult children caring for elderly parents and working parents caring for young children, this may bring forward quite different ways of dealing with what might be experienced as conflicting role demands, hard-to-combine work and care needs, overload, pressure or simply incompatible work and care places and times. Do adult children adjust their definition of the situation once their parents become dependent on their daily care, rephrasing their identity in such a way that they experience themselves more as responsible caregivers than as full-time workers? Or do they instead invest as much as possible in maintaining their identity as workers and find substitute caregivers for their parents – whether or not they are supported by such public resources as cash-for-care payments? Or do they consider that their caring role needs to be assumed in a satisfying way to maintain a strong work involvement and integration, with one dimension (the worker role) complementing the other (the caregiver role)? Our case studies show that these different options and scenarios are put into practice, and that the choice of coping strategy depends less on social policy instruments stricto sensu than on employers’ generosity in offering flexible working conditions (as in the Netherlands and Italy), which in turn influences the way adult children are able to juggle with competing demands and combine resources. Alternatively, parents of young children may be more inclined to adjust their feelings and mindsets than adult children of dependent frail elderly parents, because (most of the time) they have made a conscious decision to have a care-dependent child. Nevertheless, young parents are not always able to foresee the time it will take to care for young children; their working conditions and working times may change, they may feel disappointed in the quality of the care services on offer or – a worst-case scenario – they were counting on the support of their own parents who suddenly are in need of care themselves. If those things happen – and the following chapters show that they do – they also have to cope with this extra strain. But the care arrangements revealed by our collective research also depend fundamentally on the social representations and social norms concerning care tasks, which can vary dramatically depending on social class, generation and culture as well as over time.

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Another and more recent approach to dealing with tensions between work and family life is the ‘capabilities approach’, as applied by Hobson and colleagues (2011). Here the assumption is not that work and family life are based upon two different roles that individuals have to cope with. Instead, the assumption is that individuals – men and women alike – strive for the fulfilment of their capabilities in both domains of life by active agency. It is not their roles but the institutional frameworks – organisational constraints, social policy frameworks and gendered family structures – that limit agents in their ability to achieve a satisfying combination of work and family life. By applying this approach to several case studies, Hobson et al. found that stronger collective work agreements not only result in better job protection, but also improve workers’ agency in requesting adjustments to working hours, refusing to work additional hours or demanding more flexible hours. ‘Perceptions of insecurity in jobs and precarious economies are indicators of agency inequalities for Work-Life Balance’ (ibid: 191). Under such conditions, low-educated women in particular experience a gap between formal rights and the ability to exercise them, while men struggle to exercise their rights because the workplace culture assumes that, rather than being caregivers themselves, they are related to women who perform the family care work. An interesting finding of this study is that strong implementation of care-related social policy results in its becoming embedded in organisations, companies and firms, influencing everyday practice at the workplace. The Swedish respondents in this study assert that they are rarely asked to work unsocial hours or do overtime because their managers, employers and colleagues are aware that they have young children (Hobson et al. 2011). An example of this mechanism can also be found in this book. The Dutch case study reveals that Dutch employers leave employees who are caregivers a great deal of room for manoeuvre.

4 This book The chapters in this book do not systematically apply a theoretical approach to how working adult children and working parents deal with caring for their very old and very young family members. Instead of starting from a unique theoretical approach – whether it be the role strain theory, coping strategies, or the capabilities approach – they dive into real life and let parents and adult children talk about the way they solve the tension between the way they interpret the needs of their children, the demands of their parents, the claims of their employers, the insecurity of their jobs and the quality of the care workers who look after their relatives when they are not able to do it themselves. Therefore we apply a qualitative approach to the practices of care embedded in national public care interventions and facilities. In doing so,

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we have been able to discover the impacts of a rapidly changing labour market (featuring increased job insecurity and precariousness) on the one hand and a rapidly changing social care policy background on the other hand. This point of view has many advantages. First, it helps to highlight the incredible diversity of factors and resources that are combined in the policy framing of specific care arrangements, also revealing their concrete combination and variation over time in a given case. Second, it helps us to realise that there is much more convergence between workers’ reconciliation strategies than is usually assumed in social sciences – at least when priority is given to a macro-analysis of the policies instead of the user or citizen’s point of view. And third, this perspective raises new questions concerning such invisible factors as the disjunction between the feeling of pressure and the level of strain, with the former depending more fundamentally on the level of social expectations concerning the caregiver’s role. Studying the behaviour of caregivers in six national contexts therefore highlights the influence of different ‘care cultures’, social milieus and cultural assumptions about gender; the relative importance of the feeling of responsibility and/or obligation with regard to children and elderly relatives; and the terms of arbitration mobilised by actors to meet the contradictions and constraints imposed by the difficult coordination of working conditions and regulations. The accent in this study is therefore less on showing that a certain national configuration provides better conciliation and more on identifying what is common and dissimilar to caregivers in their daily life experience.

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4.1 The sample Our respondents2 are selected on the basis of several criteria: all of them work long or unsocial hours, and they have caring responsibilities for young children and/or dependent relatives. In our sample, we distinguished between two types of workers and caring needs: parents with young children, and senior workers (45-65 years old) with at least one dependent relative. These two categories refer to different generations, different stages of a life course, and different care responsibilities. In addition, we took into account: – Working-time characteristics. Though all the adult caregivers of elderly parents in our sample have long working days, the working parents of young children also have long or non-standard hours of work, which cover very different situations (very long working days, work on weekends, work at night, shift work, etc.). In terms of pressure, these nonstandard working hours introduce two main variables: the level of predictability of one’s working hours and how negotiable these hours are with either the company or other team members.

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– Sector of activity, whether private or public. In each country we chose certain sectors of employment in which non-standard working patterns are common (retail, hospitals, commercial activities, IT). – Level of worker qualification. We selected workers with various salary levels; type of employment contract or employment status. – Informal network resources. This refers to the proximity of grandparents or other family members in the case of caring for young children as well as the proximity of siblings in the case of caring for elderly parents. Table 1.3 Composition of the national samples

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Netherlands Portugal France Germany Italy Sweden Total

Caregivers working long or non-standard hours and childcare responsibilities 15 20 21 15 26 17 114

Working caregivers with elderly care responsibilities

Total

20 23 17 34 27 19 140

35 43 38 49 53 36 254

In the following chapters, the national research teams in the six countries covered in this book present the empirical material for their particular country and explain the main issues and lessons learned. Although each national team conducted their research separately, they came together regularly at international meetings throughout the course of our three-year project to discuss and share their experiences. Each team chose the perspective from which to answer our collective questions but also paid attention to the development of an innovative point of view. In chapter 2 on the Netherlands, Trudie Knijn and Barbara Da Roit demonstrate that the issue of reconciling work and family life is still very central, even in the ‘part-time’ work model predominant in this country, where it is generally assumed that the mainly female part-time jobs resolve the issue. Through this national case study, the authors have gained insight into the extent to which large or macro-comparisons overlook the mechanisms that mediate between policies, individual attitudes and practices. The Dutch case reveals an ambivalent pattern of attachment to employment and detachment from one’s job: as formulated by the authors, ‘caregivers are attached to being in employment but are rather “detached” from their particular job’. This national case also demonstrates the importance of the gendered work and care culture shared by all agents (employers and employees), which influences behaviour when combining work and care.

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Chapter 3 looks at the Swedish configuration. Sofia Björk, Ulla Björnberg and Hans Ekbrand debunk the myth of Swedish gender equality, insisting on the significant gender gap that still exists with regard to the caregiver role. Many more mothers than fathers allow their childcare responsibilities to take precedence over their work, and for the same reason, daughters are much more involved in elderly care than sons are. In fact, caught in their feelings of guilt for not spending enough time with their children, working mothers report having more difficulties than fathers in considering themselves ‘good parents’. Another assumption that is questioned in this chapter is the generally high level of services that facilitates reconciliation of work and care for both parents of young children and adults with elderly relatives. Recent developments and reforms show that even Sweden is facing a significant decline in public care services. This downsizing of public care in a culture of gender equality and public services has negative consequences for gender equality, in that any transfer of responsibilities from public care providers to families tends to mean transferring them further onto the shoulders of women. Chapter 4 focuses on the ways in which socio-economic conditions affect the caregiving strategies and arrangements of individuals and households in the German political context. Wolfgang Keck, Christina Klenner, Sabine Neukirch and Chiara Saraceno sketch a process that increases inequalities, since socio-economic inequalities in financial resources and job and career prospects also determine the opportunity costs incurred when reducing working time or giving up one’s job. On the one hand, the higher the income (and level of investment made in achieving and maintaining the current position), the less likely it is that caregivers will resign from their jobs or reduce their working hours, leading to inequalities not just between women and men but also between women. On the other hand, employees in low-paid jobs have lower opportunity costs when reducing their time in paid work, which explains why they more easily accept a reduction in working hours or give up their jobs altogether, which seems to be an (unintended) consequence of the social and employment policies followed in this country. In Germany, where the division of labour among parents is often based on traditional gender roles, combining paid employment and caregiving is a difficult exercise and one that receives little support from the government and even less from employers. As the authors state, ‘only those who can count on systematic family support or who have the financial means to pay for additional care, or both, may overcome the constraints from limited public support’. In chapter 5, Blanche Le Bihan, Claude Martin and Arnaud Campéon focus on French caregivers’ experiences of pressure. The authors make a distinction between the level of constraints and the feeling of pressure, observing that pressure related to the difficulties of juggling work and care is not just due to the (objective) accumulation of strain. Pressure is in-

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deed related to working conditions (working hours, employment stability), family structure (two-parent or single-parent household; only child or the presence of siblings) and caring responsibilities. Yet other elements also play a crucial role, such as the importance of the quality of the care arrangement and the feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction related to it, or the nature of the relationship between the siblings and between the caregiver and the one being cared for. Therefore, constraints can only explain part of the difficulty that working caregivers are confronted with. One must also consider the way people feel or their own interpretation of the various constraints. These subjective variables, and in particular the way in which parents and adult children interpret their own roles and their satisfaction or dissatisfaction at work, are important elements to consider. In Chapter 6, Karin Wall, Sanda Samitca and Sónia Correia present the case of Portugal. This chapter also aims to debunk a cultural stereotype – this time of Portugal as a family-based society. The authors emphasise the important changes that have taken place over the past few decades in the articulation of work and family life. They explain how these changes and reforms interact with families’ care norms and practices, with particular regard to the longstanding influence of a familialistic culture that stresses strong intergenerational obligations. The results of these rapid transformations (in family structures and behaviours, in terms of social care policies and in the labour market) lead to a mixedwelfare or mixed-care system that imposes complex combinations of resources, public and private, in order to provide the predominant dualearner model with full-time breadwinners and caregivers. The mixed social care model is particularly evident in elderly care, which includes both home-based and residential care, both family and paid informal caregivers, both publicly subsidised and private service provision. Work/ family policies for childcare and for elderly people have, however, followed slightly different paths. Childcare policies have increased both leave and services in order to support dual-earner families (defamilialisation), whereas policies concerning care for elderly people, developed later, are less based on defamilialisation. In chapter 7, Manuela Naldini, Elisabetta Donati and Barbara Da Roit present the Italian case, which is a highly familialised care system with a low level of public services offered but also, as they argue, a work/family balance shaped by generational dependencies and interdependencies. The authors insist on what they call the ‘blurring of boundaries’ (not only between different types of care – formal and informal, paid and unpaid – but also between households) and the resulting clash of loyalties in the distribution of time among the caregiver, the children, the couple, the family and the elderly parent(s). In the Italian case, caregivers have to significantly mobilise resources belonging to other generations: ‘Italian caregivers living in dual-earner couples adopt solutions which result from a complex bricolage of strategies moving across differ-

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ent spaces, across individual and family life-course phases, through commitment to working and caring related to traditional or innovative roles’. This care arrangement configuration, however, confronts caregivers with a potential conflict, given that their own parents may themselves be in need of support rather than being secondary caregivers. In Italy, as in France and to a certain extent in the Netherlands, female caregivers consider the maintenance of their own jobs to be non-negotiable – a real necessity not only for economic reasons but also in order to keep their own identity and network. In the last chapter, Manuela Naldini, Karin Wall and Blanche Le Bihan investigate one of the main lessons learned from our collective work: the development of a ‘mix of care’ across all of the countries studied. As we argue in this introduction, our perspective has been deliberately centred on the level of care arrangements. And, contrary to the usual comparative lessons on the respective performance of one set of policies compared to others (which, in accordance with the available typologies, insist on the gaps or differences between countries), we reveal some common trends in quite different welfare regimes, but also intra-national common differences depending on social class, gender, generation and sector of intervention (childcare or elderly care). In these concluding remarks, the authors come back to the main concepts and dichotomies used in the social care debate (e.g. familialisation/de-familialisation, public/private, generous/sparse leave-to-care schemes, formal/informal and semi-formal care, etc.), and depict variations around a common trend: the move towards a mixed care system mobilising different sets of resources. The authors pose two main questions: how do caregivers working long or non-standard hours themselves perceive and practise this emerging mixed care? Does the mix of care take on similar or different forms in the cases of childcare and elderly care? At the end of this project, we hope to offer an original contribution to the social care debate, which is taking place in a context of accelerated social transformations. What we observed in 2007 and 2008, when we were collecting our data, has since changed rapidly due to the far-reaching impact of the financial crisis. These changes make it more than probable that the tensions we have exposed in this project between work and family life will persist, and we therefore urge policymakers and all others involved in the debate to remain vigilant of changes occurring in the workplace.

Notes 1.

This book is the result of research conducted between 2007 and 2010 with the support of the French national research agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, or ANR). This research project, which was called WOUPS (Workers Under Pressure and Social Care), also received some additional

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funding in each country in which the research was conducted. We want to thank the ANR for its support as well as Alis Sopadzhiyan for her patient work in finalising the manuscript of this book. All interviewee names have been changed.

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References Abigail, G. and Milner, S. (2009), ‘Work-Life Balance: A Matter of Choice?’, Gender, Work and Organization, 16 (1): 1-13. Bäck-Wiklund, M., Van der Lippe T., Den Bulk L. and Doorne-Huiskes A. van (eds.) (2011), Quality of Life and Work in Europe. Theory, Practice and Policy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Balbo, L. (1987), ‘Family, Women and the State: Notes towards a Typology of Family Roles and Public Intervention’, in C.S. Maier (ed.), Changing Boundaries of the Political: Essays on the Evolving Balance Between the State and Society, Public and Private in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blome, A., Keck, W. and Alber, J. (2009), Family and the Welfare State in Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Council Directive 96/34/EC of 3 June 1996 on the framework agreement on parental leave concluded by UNICE, CEEP and the ETUC. Daly, M. (2005), ‘Changing family life in Europe: Significance for state and society’, European Societies, 7 (3): 379-398. Daly, M. (2011), ‘What adult worker model? A critical look at recent social policy reform in Europe from a gender and family perspective’, Social Politics. International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 18 (1): 1-23. Da Roit, B. (2010), Strategies of Care. Changing Elderly Care in Italy and the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Da Roit, B. and Sabatinelli S. (2007), The Cost of Childcare in EU Countries. Report presented to the European Parliament’s Employment and Social Affairs Committee (IP/A/EMPL/FWC/SC/2006-05/SC1), Brussels: European Parliament. den Dulk, L., Peper, B., Sadar, N.C., Lewis, S., Smithson, J. and Van DoorneHuiskes, A., (2011), ‘Work, family, and managerial attitudes and practices in the European workplace: Comparing Dutch, British and Slovenian financial sector managers’ Social Politics, 18 (2): 300-329. Drobnic, S. and Guillén, A.M. (eds.), (2011), Work-Life Balance in Europe. The Role of Job Quality. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Dykstra, P.A. (ed.) (2012), ‘Intergenerational family ties in Europe: Multiple linkages between individuals, families and social contexts’, Demographic Research: Special Collection 11. European Commission (2007), Towards Common Principles of Flexicurity: More and Better Jobs through Flexibility and Security. Communication to the European parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions. Brussels: COM 2007/861-862. Fagan, C. and Walthery, P. (2011), ‘Individual working-time adjustments between full-time and part-time working in European firms’, Social Politics 18 (2): 269-299.

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Frone, M.R. (2003), ‘Work-Family Balance’, in J.C. Quick and L.E. Tetrick (eds.), Handbook of Occupational Health Psychology, Washington DC: American Psychological Association: 143-162. Gerhard, U., Knijn, T. and Weckwert, A. (2005), Working Mothers in Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Guest, D.E. (2002), ‘Perspectives on the study of work-life balance’, Social Science Information, 41 (2): 255-279. Hantrais, L. and Ackers, P. (2005), ‘Women’s choices in Europe: Striking the work-life balance’, European Journal of Industrial Relations, 11 (2): 197-212 Hilbrecht, M., Shaw, S.M., Johnson, L.C. and Andrey, J. (2008), ‘“I’m home for the kids”: Contradictory implications for work-life balance of teleworking mothers’, Gender, Work and Organization, 15 (5): 454-476. Hobson, B. (2011), ‘The Agency gap in work-life balance: Applying Sen’s capabilities framework within European contexts’, Social Politics, 18 (2): 147-167. Hobson, B., Fahlen, S. and Takacs, J. (2011), ‘Agency and capabilities to achieve a work-life balance. A comparison of Sweden and Hungary’, Social Politics, 18 (2): 168-198. Hochschild A.R. (2012), The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times. New York: Metropolitan Press. Kay, T. (2003),’The Work-Life balance in social practice’, Social Policy and Society, 2: 231-239. Knijn, T. and Kremer, M. (1997), ‘Gender and the caring dimension of welfare states: Toward inclusive citizenship’, Social Politics, 4 (3): 328-361. Knijn, T. and Komter, A. (eds.) (2004), Solidarity Between the Sexes and the Generations. Transformations in Europe, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Knijn, T., Jönsson, I. and Klammer, U. (2005), ‘Care packages: The organisation of work and care by working mothers’, in U. Gerhard, T. Knijn, and A. Weckwert (eds.), Working Mothers in Europe. A Comparison of Policies and Practices, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar: 91-121. Kotowska, I. (2012), ‘Family change in Europe from a transition-to-adulthood perspective’, in T. Knijn (ed.) Work, Family Policy and the Transition to Adulthood in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan: 102-129. Lazarus, R.S. and Folkman, S. (1984), Stress, Appraisal, and Coping. NY: Springer. Le Bihan, B. and Martin, C. (2010), ‘Reforming Long-term Care Policy in France: Public/Private Complementarities’, Social Policy and Administration, 44 (4): 392-410. Leira, A. and Saraceno, Ch. (2002), ‘Care: actors, relationships and contexts’ in B. Hobson, J. Lewis and B. Siim (eds.) Contested Concepts in Gender and Social Politics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar: 55-83. Lewis, J. (2009a), Work-family Balance, Gender and Policy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Lewis, J. (2009b), ‘Balancing ‘time to work’ and ‘time to care’: Policy issues and the implications for mothers, fathers and children’, Child and Family Law Quarterly, 21 (4): 443-461. Lewis, S. and den Dulk, L. van (2008), ‘Parents’ experiences of flexible work arrangements in changing European workplaces: A multi-layer contextual approach’, Sotziologitcheski problemi/Problèmes sociologiques, 49 (2): 5-28. Lewis, J., Knijn T., Martin C. and Ostner I. (2008), ‘Patterns of development in work/family reconciliation policies for parents in France, Germany, the

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Netherlands and the UK in the 2000s’, Social Politics. International Studies in Gender, State and Society, 15 (3): 261-286. Lewis, J. and Plomien, A. (2009), ‘Flexicurity as a policy strategy: The implications for gender equality’. Economy and Society, 38 (3): 433-459. Lippe, T. van der (1993), Arbeidsverdeling tussen mannen en vrouwen. Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers. Lippe, T. van der and P. Peters (eds.) (2007), Competing Claims in Work and Family Life. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Lippe, T. van der, A. Jager and Y. Kops (2006), ‘Combination pressure: The paid work-family balance of men and women in European countries’, Acta Sociologica 49 (3): 303-319. Martin C. (2010), ‘The reframing of family policy in France: Actors, ideas and instruments’, Journal of European Social Policy, 20 (5): 410-421. Mustomäki, A., Anttila, T., Oinas, T. and Nätti, J. (2011), ‘Job quality trends in Europe – Implications for work-life balance’, in S. Drobnic and A.M. Guillén (eds.), Work-Life Balance in Europe. The Role of Job Quality. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan: 17-41. OECD Employment Outlook (2012). Ostner, I. (2004), ‘“What are children for?” Reciprocity and solidarity between parents and children’, in T. Knijn and A. Komter (eds.), Solidarity Between the Sexes and the Generations. Transformations in Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar: 167-184. Plantenga, J., Remery, Ch. and Takacs, J. (2012), ‘Public support to young families in the European Union’, in T. Knijn (ed.), Work, Family Policies and Transitions to Adulthood in Europe, Basingstoke Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Roberts, K. (2007), ‘Work-life balance – the sources of the contemporary problem and the probable outcomes: A review and interpretation of the evidence’, Employee Relations, 29 (4): 334-351. Saraceno, C. (ed.) (2008), Families, Ageing and Social policies. Intergenerational Solidarity in European Welfare States. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Scheiwe, K. and Willekens, H. (eds.) (2009), Child Care and Preschool Development in Europe. Institutional Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ungerson, C. and Yeandle, S. (eds.) (2007), Cash for Care in Developed Welfare States, London: Palgrave. Weiten, W. and Lloyd, M.A. (2008), Psychology Applied to Modern Life (9th ed.), Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

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2 Work-family balance in the Netherlands Work and care culture mediating between institutions and practices Trudie Knijn and Barbara Da Roit

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1

Introduction

The experience of working caregivers varies across European countries due to differences in family policies, flexible labour market policies (leave and transition policies) and the availability of care services (for children and elderly people). Comparative research underlines that in the Netherlands, the conflict between work and care is relatively weak compared to other countries in Europe (McGinnity & Calvert 2009; Chung 2011). Heejung Chung found that only one-third of the employed population in the Netherlands reports experiencing problems with fulfilling household tasks due to work obligations, compared with the European average of about 50 per cent. And according to the most recent survey conducted by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, there is a low level of work-life conflict in the Netherlands as well as in the Nordic countries (Eurofound 2010; Chung 2011). Dutch mothers in particular are less likely to report a conflict between work and family life than Swedish mothers (Cousins & Tang 2005). Moreover, according to McGinnity and Calvert (2009), while upper social classes consistently experience higher levels of conflict than lower classes, this is remarkably not the case in Sweden and the Netherlands, where the difference is either non-significant or very small, particularly among women. These findings do not exclude in any way the existence and persistence of gender inequalities both in the labour market and within families (Devreux 2007; Evertsson et al. 2009; Yerkes 2009). Nonetheless they deserve careful consideration, as they represent the experience of women in the juggling of care and work. The relatively low level of work-family conflict is often explained as a result of policies successfully supporting the reconciliation of work and family. Many studies, usually based on large-scale comparative surveys, approach the differences in the conciliation experience across countries by looking at the relationships between individual attitudes and practices on the one hand, and social policies that facilitate the combination of 33

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work and care on the other. However, in doing so, they tend to overlook the mechanisms that mediate between policies, individual attitudes and practices. In our contribution, we argue that the explanations linked to the existence and nature of social policies are necessary but not sufficient. We explicitly focus, in an exploratory manner, on the mechanisms that influence the work and care experiences, attitudes and practices based upon interviews with working caregivers. The empirical material on which we base our analysis derives from two integrated research projects. Our interviews with working women taking care of their older relatives were conducted as part of the Workers Under Pressure and Social Care (WOUPS) project, while our interviews with working women with childcare responsibilities were conducted as part of a ‘mini panel’ within the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study (NKPS) (Dijkstra et al. 2005, 2006).1 Our sample consists of 35 interviews, 15 of which were with mothers of young children (five of whom were single mothers) and 20 with daughters (including daughters-in-law) of older people with care needs. While most participants worked regular hours, a few worked in regular or irregular shifts (3), and others had fragmented working hours, particularly those who were self-employed (4). The fieldwork was carried out in the first half of 2008. A semi-structured interview guide – common to all national studies conducted within the WOUPS project – was used to investigate the experience of combining work and the care of either small children or older relatives in need of care. Next to factual information on the care arrangements, work organisation and family life, the interview guide was aimed at ascertaining the experiences, attitudes and normative views towards work-care balance practices. We first asked ourselves the question: what makes the experience of Dutch women combining work and care so different from that of women in many other countries? The first part of the chapter focuses on how Dutch working caregivers deal with and experience work and care arrangements. Here we point to a specific and distinct attitude towards work we found among Dutch working caregivers that might explain the reduced amount of work-related strain they experience: an ambivalent pattern of attachment to employment and detachment from one’s job. We then look at how this specific attitude to work was embedded in social and institutional factors. We therefore investigated the possible reasons for the peculiarity of the Dutch case. We argue that this unique attitude towards work is crucial in reducing the strain connected to reconciling care and work and rests on the perceived positive flexibility that the Dutch labour market and its regulation offer to employees, together with the ample opportunities offered by the Dutch labour market (even during the first years of the financial crisis) and the common perception that, especially for women, working is a choice. We claim that a set of policies, together with socio-economic structures, have in an intended or unintended manner shaped the way both employers and em-

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ployees think about the labour market and the labour market participation of women in particular. Our contribution shows not only that the scope of what is commonly considered the relevant policy area must be enlarged, but also that the gendered culture of work and care shared by all agents influences individual behaviour in combining work and care. It also provides insights into the mechanisms that mediate between the institutional setting and social policies on the one hand and individual work and family perceptions and practices on the other.

2 A particular attitude towards work and one’s job Tineke: I chose my current job very consciously because I did not like my previous job and was looking for something else. But when looking for a new employer, they have to acquiesce to my demands, because I tell them I have a daughter and I have to take care of her, and if they say they cannot agree to my terms, that is the end of it. (Mother of a seven-year-old girl and financial administrator for a consultancy firm) Vera: When it is really serious, I just take leave. Then, the firm can turn everything upside down, but then my child is my first priority of course. (Mother of two children and temporary secretary)

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These quotations from Dutch mothers of young children are characteristic of what might be termed a ‘detached’ attitude towards their jobs. This attitude can also be found among the older interviewees – the daughters who care for their elderly parents. Nienke: [My weekly schedule] can vary a lot because, um that is a matter of arranging things, because my parents need me a lot. Also considering the care for my parents, I’m happy I left my job [at the newspaper] because normally you work from 8 o’clock till whenever you are needed if you are working by contract. You also have got evenings and weekends that you have to work and so on. Now that’s not the case anymore. (Freelance journalist caring for both her parents)

What is particularly interesting when looking at the attachment of the Dutch interviewees to work is the sharp difference in attitude toward employment as such and towards one’s job in particular.

2.1 Attachment to employment … In all the countries studied in the WOUPS project, women report a strong attachment to work, regardless of their level of occupation (Le

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Bihan & Martin 2008). And in this respect, the Netherlands reflects the general pattern. For the Netherlands we have included in the sample only women with a (nearly) full-time job: this certainly does not represent a realistic picture of the labour market participation of Dutch women, 75 per cent of whom work part-time (Merens et al. 2011). However, by making this choice in the research design, we found that the Dutch interviewees did not deviate in this respect from their counterparts in the other countries studied in this book. Both the mothers of young children and the daughters of older people in need of care are highly attached to paid work. In spite of the high variability of care arrangements and of their variation throughout time in relation to events like the onset of disability, the sudden or progressive worsening of health conditions of the older parents, the changes in the available informal resources, etc., what remains relatively constant in the ways these women manage their lives is paid work. None of the daughters taking care of their parent(s) stopped working because of caregiving, nor did they substantially reduce their working times according to new emerging needs. In general, for these middleaged women, work is not negotiable; work is a constraint in the sense that it represents a limit beyond which care should not go. If some mothers stopped working, they did so for the allotted maternity leave and returned to work immediately after that. And if they did stay at home for a short period after their children were born, it was either because they were on welfare for health reasons or could not find work. Starting one’s own business is another option to decrease the constraint that work represents for their care responsibilities. In spite of the possible bias of our small sample – in which only working caregivers were included – there are signs that this trend is present in society at large. An increasing proportion of women remain in the labour market after the birth of their first child – rising from 38 per cent in 2001 to 50 per cent in 2009 – while the shift from full-time to part-time work remained constant at around 40 per cent over the same time period (Merens et al. 2011: 113). Moreover, recent research conducted in the Netherlands suggests that the impact of caring for an older parent on one’s work is smaller than expected, including among women (Putten et al. 2010). Of course, remaining employed is more a necessity for some women, due to their educational and household income level or their household situation. More importantly, however, remaining employed also has an effect on self-fulfilment, economic autonomy, avoidance of social isolation and the future prospects of working mothers as well as working daughters. What is striking is that this type of attitude (with different shades and accents) is widespread regardless of socioeconomic conditions: this is true not only for women who have high-skilled jobs and responsibilities but also for women with low-skilled jobs. Anja, a 51-yearold policy advisor in a hospital, has been caring for her mother for years now and is very fond of her job, as she wants to create meaning in her

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life in more ways than just as a caregiver. ‘The job is for myself’, as she puts it; it allows her to meet other people and to talk about other subjects than caregiving. Despite having the opportunity to work fewer hours, she does not want to, nor does she want to have a reduced income. Dorien, a mother who works as a secretary at a university department, explains: [By working,] you expand your world […] you are not just a mother and you are not only occupied with your child, you also have your work and the recognition you receive there. It is also really nice to do something and to see how happy it makes other people. These are very important aspects [of life].

The same goes for Hiske, a 59-year-old supermarket cashier. She states that she would not quit her job even if she could retire, because she likes it so much. She enjoys the contact with customers and colleagues and the informal atmosphere at work. Finally, the importance of being in employment is also felt by professional care workers, albeit in a different manner. Rianne, a 58-year-old part-time care worker, explains that her work protects her against her over-demanding mother in need of care. She feels that her clients appreciate her more than her mother does, and although she experiences it as a demanding job also in relation to her own health problems, she does not want to quit. It is satisfying for her to help others in the context of her job. This does not imply that it is always easy to combine a caring job with informal care work. Pauline feels that having to care as a job next to having to care as a daughter is emotionally too demanding. For her, however, she has no choice but to remain in her job until or unless she finds a different one, which is very difficult due to her qualifications and experience.

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2.2 … and detachment from one’s job Even if work is far from being unimportant among working caregivers in the Netherlands, combining care and work in the Dutch context is marked by a ‘special’ relationship to work – one that is not found in any other country included in this study. In general, work is perceived as adjustable to the employee’s specific care demands, whether it is the care of young children or of older parents. This perception encompasses three different elements. First, working women in the Netherlands appear to (still) feel that it is their own choice to be employed. Although the economic reasons for having a job are sometimes accentuated, especially among lower-skilled and lower-income women, this does not mean that the caring mothers and daughters state that they work because they have to financially. If financial arguments are expressed, these relate to economic independence with respect to their partner as well as from external resources, be

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they private or public (i.e. the welfare state). Both sides of being economically independent are highlighted by Femke, a single parent of two children and assistant manager in a small shop:

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Well, it is mostly that you are not dependent on other people, that you earn your own money and that it [the combination of work and care] all works out. For me, another point is that I have no debts, nothing.

Femke’s reference to being financially dependent on ‘other people’ refers both to her ex-partner – the father of her children – and to social assistance benefits. She considers it her ‘choice’ not to depend on either of these, and for that reason she experiences her paid job as her own decision. Whether this is realistic or not, this perception goes back to postwar Dutch history in which families could afford to depend on the male breadwinner, as analysed by Plantenga (1993). Moreover, the generous social assistance for single mothers (until 1996) and the continuing practice – in spite of the law being tightened recently – of exempting single mothers from the obligation to work if their caring responsibilities are considered too stressful contribute to this persistent perception of women as having the option not to participate in the labour market (see also Knijn & Van Wel 2001). Second, also because of this perception of employment as a choice, caring women expect and demand that jobs are flexible enough to allow them to reconcile care and work, which more often than not is the case. As we will illustrate, their experience is that it is appropriate to negotiate the number of working hours, the working times, the number of hours they can work at home and the adjustment of their holidays to those of their school-aged children. Third, an employer who is not flexible enough is not acceptable and thus should and can be substituted with another. Although on the basis of our interviews we do not have evidence for this assumption, the gender-segregated labour market might be a crucial explanatory factor in this perceived ‘easiness’ with regard to shifting from one job to another. For many years, and until the effects of the financial crisis were also experienced in the Netherlands, there has been a huge labour shortage in the female part of the labour market, in particular in the domains of care work, nursing, education and other public and private services. Employers in those sectors are therefore more than willing to accommodate female applicants in their demand for flexible but permanent – part-time – jobs. As a result, Dutch women distinguish between being employed, which is nowadays an important aim for self-development, social contacts and financial autonomy, and their specific job, which should fit into their demands for flexibility. This distinction is seen above all in the flexible management of working times by the caring mothers and daughters. Working part-time, even if for relatively long hours, represents as such a

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facilitating element in combining work and care. Moreover, Dutch mothers as well as caring daughters put in place several creative arrangements in order to increase their availability for caring: working extra hours per week and saving these for paid leave, starting to work early in the morning in order to have time left at the end of the afternoon for their care responsibilities, or working nine hours per day for four days of the week to have a day off for caregiving, working night shifts, working one day a week at home, or being self-employed. Finally, holidays play a role in the combination of work and care, as it is common among the women to dedicate some of their holidays to care. Dutch employees tend to have more vacation days than they actually spend on holidays. These extra days are often saved up by caregivers to fill the sometimes unpredictable gaps in the care arrangement, such as visits to the doctor, or to take their parents for a day out or to care for their children at home. These might be favourable solutions for mothers and caring daughters to balance work and family life, but they can be realised only under specific conditions. One condition is that the employer agrees to each of these arrangements. According to the mothers and daughters we interviewed, most employers appear to be cooperative in finding a solution for the care tasks that women are perceived to have. If not, caregivers are ready to look for another job. Vera, a secretary and a mother, explains that when she has to take time off from work during care gaps, she needs her working environment to be understanding. Fortunately, she says, her employer is usually cooperative, but if this were not the case, she would not think twice about just leaving work. Vera describes the most recent situation: Vera: Last year, my daughter was in the hospital. That was a very intense and tiring ordeal. Then my husband took some time off and I took time off work, too. I told them that I hoped they did not mind, because I could not afford to lose my job, but because of the serious situation, my daughter had to come first. Luckily, they were understanding; that was nice. Of course, that varies – the one time they take it into account and the other time they do not. You have to be lucky, and that is what happened. Once my daughter was a bit better, I went back to work immediately.

In addition, Vera explains that she would not in any case have been very motivated to work if her daughter had been ill and she had not been able to stay with her, so it was also better for the employer to give her the time off. That way she could return to work and be even more efficient because of the good understanding between her and her employer. Clara, a 50-year-old woman caring for both her parents, is unemployed: she left her job as a management secretary because it did not allow her to care properly for her relatives. She is now looking for a new part-time job and does not want to compromise on this.

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Lieke, who works as a secretary at a hospital, explains that, luckily, her employer is very flexible: I have to say honestly that my employer is very flexible. My daughter has growth problems and whenever I have to take her to the hospital [or] a doctor’s appointment or when I have to do something at her school, then they [the employer] are very easy in that they give me a day off … but of course I make up for it by coming back during my free days. Also, when there is an emergency or something unexpected, then I can also leave right away.

This does not mean, however, that no constraints at all are experienced by Dutch caregivers with regard to working times or flexible solutions to combine work and care. Such constraints are mainly experienced by single parents and by women who work in shifts or whose partners do so because of their specific jobs. Femke, a single mother, looks back at the shifts she and her ex-husband worked while they were still married: When you look at it in hindsight, at the time you really lived parallel lives in which you only got to see each other during the weekend. It is a good solution for the children [as there is always someone there to care for them], but it is not a good way to live your life.

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3 Employees, employers and the work-family life balance The attitudes of the mothers of young children and the daughters of elderly parents presented above illustrate the way Dutch women deal with reconciling work and care in relation to ‘different working time regimes and to different compromises and solutions to the unresolved tensions surrounding the conciliation of work and family life’ (Cousins & Tang 2005). A detached attitude towards their particular jobs – but not to work as such – enlarges the degree of freedom Dutch women have in adjusting their working hours to their perceived care obligations, to take time off or to demand flexible working hours that allow them to care at the ‘proper’ times of the day and week. So what exactly makes up the combination of attitudes, cultural settings and family policy configurations in the Netherlands that could explain the particular work-family life balance in this country? Why are Dutch women so easygoing with regard to their jobs and so firm in protecting their kinkeeping responsibilities and their unpaid care work? Many scholars have puzzled over this issue, and many explanations have been presented and studied over a number of decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, many studies focused on individual decisions. Under the condition of high male wages, a family could afford to have only one earner (Plantenga 1993, 2002). As a result, female preferences

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could prevail (Hakim 2002), and the high opportunity costs of women’s employment (Van der Lippe 1993) and/or the prevailing attitudes about motherhood (Knijn 1994) resulted in the strict division of tasks between the genders. From the 1980s on, social policy studies found explanations in the well-regulated and protected part-time labour market and, from the 1990s on, the lack of affordable childcare provision and paid parental leave. The experiences of these women, however, show a more complicated picture. First, these women do prioritise their care responsibilities over their job but not over work, underlining their perception that employers themselves are interchangeable. In fact, quantitative longitudinal evidence shows how voluntary mobility is a widespread phenomenon in the Netherlands, including among women, and is affected by dissatisfaction with different aspects of a job (Gesthuizen 2009). Second, these mothers of young children and daughters of elderly relatives in need of care firmly state that they set priorities and make demands on how they want to regulate and balance work and family life, but they also express some confidence in being able to realise their demands and seem to succeed in doing so. It is this kind of confidence and success that is the main and striking difference between the Dutch mothers and those from the other European countries in our study. We now focus on the social and institutional features in which this peculiar attitude towards employment is embedded.

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3.1 Working caregivers’ attitudes towards care A first possible explanation for the Dutch attitude can be found in the interrelationship between the attitude towards work and the attitude towards caring for children or older relatives. A relaxed attachment to one’s job and the gendered perceptions of working women and their employers do have their counter-value in the gendered ‘preference’ for care work. However, this type of consideration can only partly illustrate the specific Dutch configuration for at least two reasons. First, care attitudes differ considerably between mothers of young children and daughters of older people, while their attitude towards employment and specific occupations appears to be quite similar. Second, the strong care ethos does not reflect a weaker work ethos – in contrast, the two go together. A comparison between the care attitudes of working daughters and working mothers shows that care as a ‘priority’ over work represents a well-known feature among mothers of young children in the Netherlands. In spite of the rapid increase in the number of working women, this care attitude still dominates the mindset of Dutch mothers, even if in practice many working women are not realising their care ideals any longer (Knijn 1994; Kremer 2007; Van Wel & Knijn 2006). An explanation might be that by considering a paid job as a voluntary, self-chosen option, the way back to full-time motherhood – or to another job that is

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more compatible with caring for one’s children – remains open. By keeping in mind the exit-from-work option, these mothers might feel less guilty about not realising the prevailing Dutch ‘care ideal’. Brenda, a single mother and elementary school teacher with an almost full-time working week, says: I really feel that if you have a child, then one of the two parents should be there. It does not matter whether it is the father or the mother, as long as one of them is there most of the time. That might not be very emancipated, but I feel that is because you make that choice [to have children] yourself.

Dorien, who is a secretary at a university department and also a single parent, has her daughter taken care of in a formal childcare centre. However, she leaves no doubt about the discrepancy between her ‘care ideal’ and her current practice:

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Yes, there was really nothing else I could do, no other options were available. My mother had passed away, my father is not involved and I have no other family in this area. The father of the child, he is no good. He does not contribute in either practical or financial matters. So I did not have a choice, if I wanted to work I had to make use of this type of childcare.

In contrast to the care ideals concerning children, care ideals toward older family members are much less of a traditional feature in Dutch society, in part because of the early development of a highly inclusive and comprehensive collective long-term care system (Da Roit 2010). Moreover, elderly Dutch people, who of course can express their ideals better than young children can, tend to avoid becoming dependent on their adult children for care for as long as they can. They do not want to put the care burden on their adult children and prefer professional formal care over being cared for by their relatives. They attach much value to being autonomous in relation to their relatives. However, this care ideal is no longer feasible. The highly inclusive and comprehensive long-term care system has been under pressure for at least two decades now, and continuous reforms have increasingly put the emphasis on informal care. This tendency is occurring at the same time that increasing numbers of of middle-aged women who take up the care responsibility for their older relatives are joining the workforce. The ‘detached attitude’ of Dutch working and caregiving adult daughters toward their jobs probably finds its origin in trying to bridge this discrepancy between on the one hand the unavoidable care needs of elderly relatives who are no longer covered by the long-term care system and, on the other hand, the preference for a paid job. Annemiek is 40 years old; she is married and has one five-year-old and one seven-year-old child, a very demanding and well-qualified job, and two parents in need of care. Her attitude is ambivalent, as she feels

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that caregiving is unavoidable and does not want to outsource the care if the quality is not good, but at the same time she wants to protect her life, work and family: I just want to live my own life; I do not want all that care. I am busy enough with my job and my own children, so to say. I do not want to pay attention all the time to my parents. During the years, the pressure increases. And suddenly you think ‘this is enough’ … He [the father] is registered for an old people’s home, which he does not know himself. But the problem is that in that home, people have to share a bedroom. We think that is degrading and a bridge too far. But if he gets a room of his own and if my mother has to go to hospital again, this is what will happen. If something happens and we have to take turns to stay with him during the night, we will do it again, but there are limits … My sister and I, we think it is too much at the moment. We have not chosen our parents, and I am the youngest of the family, and it takes up so much time in my already busy life with a job and two young children.

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Afke is a pedicurist. She likes her job for different reasons. She works part-time at a beauty centre. It is relaxing and flexible and allows her to combine her work with the care of her mother. The work at the hospital is a bit more stressful, but she likes it because it takes her mind off things. Her colleagues are important, as they are key contacts for her and a crucial source of support. Lately she has been under a lot of stress and sometimes has called in sick. On those days, she visited her mother. She recently discovered that her mother is not well-fed by the staff of the nursing home where she is living. She also received a letter from the nursing home asking family members to help out more because of staff shortages and cutbacks: I’m truly furious about that. We’ve been informal caregivers for 15 years, I never go on vacation for more than a week and if I go, I have friends that visit my mother. The last few years my parents lived at home, we did so much it almost cost me my marriage. And after you’ve done all of that, the nursing home dares to ask even more of the family.

However, as recalled above, what our interviewees express is a detachment from their jobs and not from employment as such. In other words, our empirical material suggests that these women are able to maintain a high priority for caring while expressing their strong attachment to work thanks to the fact that they perceive themselves as relatively free to choose their specific job in the labour market.

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3.2 Employers’ attitudes towards caregiving employees If the working caregivers believe they are able to choose their jobs according to their work-related requirements, a third-party factor has to be added to the equation: (female) employees can only perceive that they have room to manoeuvre if they have reason to assume that their employers tend to agree with their prioritised commitment to care tasks and to their demand for flexibility. There appear to be several routes towards getting the employer’s permission to work flexible hours. For instance, Chantal, a mother of three children, works 32 hours per week as a secondary school teacher. While such a contract normally implies that one works reduced hours over five days a week, Chantal has a very flexible boss who allows her to work three days a week and to work at home for a half day. The disadvantage, however, appears to be that the additional work (preparing lessons and grading exams) never seems to stop, which is why Chantal, in spite of her clearly structured working week, hardly has any time for her own leisure activities. Tineke, who firmly states that she would quit if her employer could not meet her demands for reconciling her care responsibilities, also works overtime if the job demands it and does not mind if her employer or her colleagues call her on her free day. In doing so, she builds up credit which she uses to take care time when her daughter needs her attention. Rita, a mother of four children who has a full-time job by combining a 24-hour contract as a marketing employee at an IT firm with 20 hours working for an international business firm, was surprised when her new employer accepted her conditions:

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That was a precondition. Look, I liked the job; I didn’t want to reject it. I thought: how can I get rid of this [opportunity]? I would rather have someone decide for me in such a case. So I requested a ridiculously high salary and all the flexibility in the world. And he gave me that. And then I could not say no of course.

Working daughters generally have friendly work environments in addition to flexible working hours. Interestingly, many caregivers point to the fact that their employers (or managers) as well as their colleagues are familiar with their situation because they themselves, or people they know well, are dealing with the same problems. The impact of the greying society on personal and family life is experienced by almost all middle-aged people, which contributes to a consensus on the need to support those employees who have actual care responsibilities. For instance, Monique, who is 53 years old, married and mother of two children who have now left home, spent many years caring for her mother who spent seven years in a nursing home before passing away. During these years, Monique worked full-time and hardly took any time off for care while going to see her mother every day after work. Her colleagues are approxi-

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mately the same age as her, and many of them are in a similar situation. Her employer knew the situation and showed great understanding: I am really a very good employee. So my boss says, ‘please relax, if you have to go I will take over’, or a colleague will do it. I really discussed it with him; also at the time my mother was very sick. And he said, ‘well, let us see what happens, just do what you need to do and if you have to leave again, just send an e-mail and go’.

In sum, it is not just Dutch mothers and daughters who perceive care work to be an important priority for women in the family but also the employers of women who appear to be reasonably cooperative in arranging flexible working conditions that allow women to balance work and family care. This is typical for all the employed caregiving mothers and daughters, with the exception of a few women in our study who deliberately decided to work full-time and not adjust their work arrangements to their family life. These women chose instead to make use of full-time care by a nanny or formal childcare.

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4 Employees’ and employers’ attitudes: Culture and the institutional context A shared view on work flexibility therefore seems to be the common ground on which female employees manage to combine care and work successfully. Employees claim a certain degree of freedom in organising their work so that it becomes compatible with their perceived care responsibilities. At the same time, employers are ready to recognise this as a reasonable request and to consent to the flexible arrangement of working times in favour of their female employees. This appears to be a much more common and consensual phenomenon compared to what happens in any other country studied in this book. Where this shared attitude comes from is an important question that cannot be answered by delving into the traditional features of Dutch society, as female employment is a relatively recent phenomenon, together with the very idea of employment flexibility. The latter finds its origins in the combination of different institutional transformations that took place in the Netherlands from the 1980s. The shared cultural perception of how to facilitate women’s reconciliation of work and care is embedded in an institutional setting that in turn produces effects by reducing the degree of work-life conflict. This institutional setting arises from a combination of different sources of protection for working and caring women: (4.1) protection ‘from’ the labour market ensured by the reliance on a partner’s income or on the welfare state; (4.2) protection ‘in’ the labour market determined by the high degree of regulation of part-time work and of working times in general;

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(4.3) protection ‘by’ the labour market, given its post-industrial features – namely the constant growth of services financed by the welfare state and the subsequent availability of part-time jobs generally filled by women.

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4.1 Feeling protected from the labour market: The impact of the modified male breadwinner model and of the welfare state According to the traditional male breadwinner model in the Netherlands, full-time motherhood was protected both in and out of wedlock either through generous provisions to the male breadwinner or to generous social assistance to lone mothers (Bussemaker et al. 1997). Since then, Dutch women living together with a partner have been very financially dependent on their partners, right up until the 1990s (Plantenga 1993). The rise of the one-and-a-half-earner model has only partly reduced the financial dependency of women, who still contribute less than men to household finances. Less than half (48 per cent) of all Dutch women are economically independent (Merens et al. 2011). Moreover, as second earners, they can afford to think that their personal income is not crucial for the household. One major turning point in the political discourse took place in the mid-1990s and had an effect on policies aimed at ‘activating’ women and fostering their participation in the labour market. A particularly radical change (Knijn 1994; Bussemaker et al. 1997; Knijn & van Wel 2001) in Dutch policy and politics was the reform of the General Social Assistance Act (nieuwe Algemene Bijstandswet) that came into effect in 1996. This law required lone mothers on social assistance to actively seek work as soon as their youngest child reached five years of age or else lose their entitlement to benefits. Nevertheless, studies on the implementation of this part of the law revealed that this new policy was not very successful. Several reasons account for this failure, such as the lack of childcare facilities, the importance of local discretionary power, the characteristics of lone mothers on welfare (low-skilled, often suffering from bad health), and a dominant care ethic both among mothers and among social workers responsible for encouraging their participation in the labour market (Knijn & van Wel 2001). Moreover, Dutch politicians also appear to be reluctant to combine motherhood with employment. Since 1996, the social assistance law has been amended at least four times, each time with new regulations for lone mothers, some more strict than others. The 2004 Law on Work and Social Security (Wet Werk en Bijstand, WWB) required all lone parents of children at any age to look for work. In 2007, under a different governmental coalition, the law was reverted to exempt lone mothers with children below the age of five (Coalition Agreement 2007: 29). As a result of these sometimes contradictory developments, the market dependency of lone mothers is still quite limited in the Dutch context, which implies a certain degree of

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freedom for these women in making decisions concerning jobs when they have limited financial worries, at least in the short term. It is this ‘financial comfort zone’ of the male breadwinner and the welfare state that allows women involved in caregiving some room for manoeuvre and likely fosters the idea that when a job conflicts with care needs, a new one can be sought even if it comes at the cost of spending some time without a job. The protection provided by both the family and the welfare state contributes, therefore, to the flexibilisation of labour market participation and to a reduced perception of the conflict between working and caring.

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4.2 Feeling protected in the labour market: Part-time and working time flexibility as the norm In contrast to other countries where part-time work is widespread but also less regulated and represents a distinct and disadvantaged segment of the labour force with a polarisation between (female) full-time and part-time workers (Gallie et al. 1998; Hakim 2000; Walby 1997), in the Netherlands, ‘part-time employment has been integrated into a regulated labour market environment in accordance with the principles of equal treatment in labour law and wage structures’ (Fagan & Lallement 2000: 45). Regulation of part-time work has its origins in the Netherlands in the 1980s. The objective of the 1982 social pact between labour unions and employers’ organisations – the so-called Wassenaar Agreement – was the redistribution of work in a context of high unemployment rates. One unintended consequence of the agreement was the gendered division of the labour market into male full-time and female part-time segments. This was the result of distinct parallel processes, namely women’s increasing educational levels and their demands for work, the need for new employees in the growing post-industrial service economy, and the scarcity of childcare provision and parental leave measures (Bussemaker & Van Kersbergen 1994; Plantenga 2002; Visser & Hemerijck 1997). Since then, part-time work has been progressively regulated, and parttime employees have been working under the same conditions as fulltime workers. Between 1993 and 1996, a series of legislation was put into place prohibiting discrimination against employees based upon the number of working hours. Entitlements to the statutory minimum wage and the minimum holiday allowance as well as social security, including health insurance, were extended to all workers irrespective of the number of hours worked. Part-time employees were explicitly provided with a right to equal treatment – pro rata – in areas negotiated by social partners, such as wages, holiday pay and entitlements, bonuses and training. Since 2000, under the ‘Adapting Working Hours Act’ (Wet Aanpassing Arbeidsduur), any employee who has worked for the same employer for at least a year has the right to adjust his/her working hours, unless spe-

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cific commercial or organisational reasons make this impossible. With the exception of Sweden, none of the other countries in the WOUPS study has this kind of protection for part-time employees. What seems crucial here is that what was an unintended consequence of regulation aimed at a specific and temporary crisis (high unemployment rates in the 1980s) has found its way into the hearts and minds of the working population as well as of companies within a period of three decades. Part-time working today is self-evident for a majority of women – and a minority of men – even if they have no children or older relatives to care for; and employers as well as the working culture have adapted to (female) part-time workers in many sectors. In 2009, the average working week in the Netherlands was 25 hours for women and 37 hours for men (Merens et al. 2011: 83). This arrangement has, however, given rise to a polarisation and segmentation of the labour market. In particular, highly specialised male sectors of the economy as well as high positions in almost all sectors are exclusively reserved for full-time workers; hence there are very few women in high functions in the Netherlands. Fragmentation is another consequence: hospitals, schools, municipalities, social work and citizens that make use of these public services have to deal with professional workers who work part-time and whose presence is far from continuous. Regulated part-time work has not only become the main conciliation instrument but is recognised as such by employers and employees. In general, more flexible time management has become an employee expectation as well as an accepted feature of employment conditions agreed to by employers as a result of continuous policy emphasis on the issue in the last thirty years. In contrast to the Nordic countries, where social policies including extensive and generous parental leave schemes and the provision of public childcare have supported working mothers since the 1970s (Björnberg 2002), in the Netherlands it was not until 2009 that paid parental leave for employees was introduced. And despite the women’s movement’s demands since the 1970s, it was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the government began to take responsibility for expanding the supply of childcare facilities. In order to limit public expenditure, the government promoted a mixed supply of public and private facilities. The 2005 Childcare Act (Wet Kinderopvang) provides a new framework for arranging childcare. The law regulates the quality and the funding of a range of childcare facilities, whereas the responsibility for arranging care is placed with the parents. The latter must choose which type of care facilities they want to make use of (childminders, crèches) among the ones that are recognised and accredited by the municipality. The availability of places in formal childcare centres for children up to three years of age increased from 50,000 to 160,000 between 1996 and 2008. The percentage of small children attending these centres grew from 13 per cent to 33 per cent in the same period. While these are full-time services (five days a week with

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an extended daily schedule), only a very, very small minority of children attend a childcare centre for five days a week (Merens et al. 2011: 122). Until 2009, only a small minority of employed parents had obtained 13 weeks of paid parental leave (in addition to a comparatively short, fully compensated maternity leave of 16 weeks), to be used on a flexible basis (full-time for 13 weeks or part-time for a longer period) until the child turns eight. The individualisation of entitlement – the 13 weeks are available to each parent and can be taken at the same time or in succession – together with its flexibility in usage and the lack of universal compensation may explain why mainly women make use of this benefit, even though the Netherlands has one of the highest percentages of men taking parental leave. Nevertheless, the need to increase the labour force due to the ageing of the population pushed political parties to find a solution to compensate parental leave in order to support mothers in their efforts to combine paid work and care. After some failed experiments, a new coalition of Social and Christian Democrats finally extended the leave period from 13 to 26 weeks. From January 2009 on, male and female employees can reduce their working weeks with at maximum 50 per cent for a maximum period of 26 weeks for parental leave until the child has reached the age of eight. Their reduced income is compensated by a reduction of their taxable income by 50 per cent of the official minimum wage per hour of leave, with a maximum ceiling of € 690 per month. A condition is that the employee has worked (either part-time or full-time) for at least one year with the same employer. This mechanism is meant to fulfil three goals: gender equality (each parent can take the leave on an individual basis), shared public and private responsibility, and helping parents with care responsibilities to stay in employment.2 Several explanations can be given for what has until very recently been a rather backward social policy in the Netherlands. First, the regulation of part-time work and the underlying idea that mothers of young children should opt for a part-time job reduced the urgency of paid parental leave (Knijn 2008) and of childcare provision. Second, employers, trade unions, politicians and also the population at large envisioned the combination of work and motherhood as an individual decision for mothers. Hence it was not perceived to be a collective risk that should be covered by public or collective means. Third, the public financing of parental leave had no chance of finding political advocates because of the ideological shift towards the neo-liberal emphasis on individual responsibility, which in the 1990s was also adopted by the Social Democrats. The late development of the leave system and its limited generosity, together with the late development of childcare provision, can be partly explained, as suggested above, by the large availability of part-time work and regulated working time flexibility. However, it can also be argued that these late developments reinforced the preferential use of working-time flexibility as a conciliation instrument and made it all that more socially accept-

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able. In turn, since they were introduced, leave and childcare provisions have been used more to increase the flexibility of working schedules than to allow full-time participation in the labour market (alternated with longer periods of absence), as happens in other national contexts. Even if full-time childcare is nowadays available and affordable, hardly any child attends a childcare centre full-time: what is most common is a pattern of part-time work and part-time care for the children, either by the mother or by both parents successively. In 2009, the average number of hours of childcare for small children was 25 hours per week, and only 10 per cent of children attended childcare for more than three days a week (Merens et al. 2011: 124). At the same time, in 2009, the take-up rates of parental leave were 41 per cent and 19 per cent for eligible female and male workers respectively. Gender differences in the amount of leave taken are, however, minimal. Mothers take leave for an average of eleven hours per week over a period of ten months, while fathers take seven hours per week over a period of thirteen months (Merens et al. 2011: 126).

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4.3 Care work in an era of post-industrialisation, public-sector employment growth and gendered employment The Netherlands began moving from an industrial to a post-industrial society and economy in the 1970s. Alongside the decline of the traditional industrial sectors, the rise of the service economy was partly related to market developments and partly to the growth of services provided or financed by the public sector, such as health and social care, education and so on. Three interrelated aspects characterise a post-industrial labour market (Palier 2010): a) the gender segregation of sectors, b) the gender segregation of working times, and c) the growth of the female-dominated public (or publicly funded) services, such as care for children and old people. The growth in the public sector contributed to 13 per cent of the rise in employment, in contrast to the private sector which only contributed 1 per cent to employment growth. More specifically, the growth of public services in the care, cure and welfare sectors amounted to 28 per cent in the period 2000-2008, while the educational sector grew by 10 per cent (Pommer & Eggink et al. 2010). The growth in jobs in the care sector alone – which includes the personnel of nursing and care homes and home care services – provides a good example of the importance of welfare-state-funded labour market segments. Between 1985 and 2005, the number of workers employed in the care sector grew from 150,000 to 220,000 full-time equivalents, and most of this growth took place after the early 1990s (Eggink et al. 2010: 57). At the same time, in 2009, more than 80 per cent of the total workforce in the care and welfare sector and 60 per cent in the educational sector were women. Moreover, even during periods of limited growth or recession, the educational, care and wel-

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fare sectors have shown a stable pattern of annual employment growth at much higher levels than any other sector of the economy (Borghouts-van de Pas et al. 2009: 19), which implies – till recently – a low level of uncertainty about job opportunities even in times of economic decline. Hence, and because of the gender segregation of the labour market, employment opportunities for women in jobs like teaching, nursing and care work have steadily increased. A labour market generally characterised by labour shortages, also present in those ‘gendered’ sectors mentioned above (Borghouts-van de Pas et al. 2009; OECD 2008), has clear effects on the perceived opportunities and constraints of both employers and employees. For (potential) employees, this means they have a broader range of possibilities and room for negotiation with their employers with respect to working times and other arrangements that favour the workers’ conciliation strategies. Employers, who are keen on retaining their employees and filling job vacancies, are therefore more sensitive to these issues and more willing to come to an agreement. These features of the labour market, which certainly also conceal traps for women, contribute substantially to increasing their sense of security and to reducing their perception of a trade-off between caring and working.

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5 Conclusion The starting point of this chapter was an observation that emerged when comparing the results of this European research project: in the Netherlands, working caregivers – both mothers of young children and daughters of older people in need of care – display an ambivalent attitude towards work. They are attached to being in employment but rather detached from their particular job. In other words, they value the idea of participating in paid work, but they start and keep a specific job as long as it allows them to combine care and work. We have shown that this attitude towards work reveals a perception that being in employment represents a choice, the conviction that jobs should be flexible and if not, that they can be changed. These findings are consistent with and provide a possible explanation for previous research results showing that in the Netherlands, perceived work-life conflict is relatively low. While existing explanations tend to indicate either individual attitudes or institutional features (namely social policies) as responsible for this low level of conflict, we argue that the particular attitude of Dutch employees towards work mediates the tension between employment and caring responsibilities. This attitude is embedded in a shared cultural perception and in institutional features, namely the general acceptance – from the point of view of both employers and employees – of part-time and flexible working schedules resulting from implicit and explicit policies that regulate working times

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and that provide incentives for flexible time schedules. Both features have their origins in the persistent growth of employment funded by the welfare state, which is female-dominated, and the structural presence of shortages in some sectors of the Dutch labour market. The underlying gender paradox here is that this facilitated and easygoing balancing of work and care tends to block female careers in the Netherlands, as is evident in the relative dearth of Dutch women in the higher ranks of companies, universities and at the level of public functions compared with other European countries (Eurostat 2008; Groeneveld 2009; Portegijs et al. 2006).

Notes 1.

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2.

The NKPS project was financed by a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). In addition to parental leave, some provisions are extended to employees who need to take time off due to other care responsibilities. All employees are entitled to emergency leave for urgent personal or family matters. In case of illness of a member of the family, emergency leave may be taken only for the first day. Thereafter, different arrangements may apply. During emergency leave, the employer will continue to pay the employee’s salary. The employer may ask to have the emergency leave compensated with holidays, with the employee’s agreement. Such arrangements regarding holidays and emergency leave may also be detailed in collective agreements between employers and employees. In any case, this compensation may only concern holidays that exceed a minimum (four times the number of work days per week per year). Moreover, each employee is entitled to short-term leave if caring for an ill child, partner or parent living at home. The leave may be taken for a maximum of ten days per year. During short-term leave, the employee receives at least 70 per cent of his/her salary unless a collective agreement provides for higher compensation. Finally, each employee is entitled to longterm leave in the case of caring for a seriously ill child, partner or parent who has a life-threatening illness or is at serious risk of losing his/her life. The leave may be taken for a maximum period of six times the weekly working hours. Normally this type of leave would be 12 weeks, during which the employee is allowed to work no more than half of the number of hours he/ she would normally work. In consultation with the employer, the leave may be spread out in a different manner. The employer can refuse long-term leave on the grounds of problems of a commercial or organisational nature. The employer is not entitled to take a view on the specific need for care nor the care to be offered. Moreover, once the leave has been agreed upon, the employer cannot renege upon this agreement.

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Gallie, D., White, M., Cheng, Y. and Tomlinson, M. (1998), Restructuring the Employment Relationship, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gesthuizen, M. (2009), ‘Job characteristics and voluntary mobility in the Netherlands. Differential education and gender patterns?’, International Journal of Manpower, 30 (6): 549-566. Groeneveld, S. (2009), ‘Careers in the Dutch civil service: A gender perspective’, International Review of Administrative Sciences, 75: 493-507. Hakim, C. (2000), Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hakim, C. (2002), ‘Life style preferences as determinants of women’s differentiated labour market careers’, Work and Occupations, 29 (4): 428-59. Knijn, T. (1994a), ‘Social dilemmas in the images of motherhood in the Netherlands’, The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 1 (2): 183-206. Knijn, T. (1994b), ‘Fish without bikes; revision of the Dutch welfare state and its consequences for the (in)dependence of single mother’, Social Politics 1 (1): 83-105. Knijn, T. (2008), ‘Private responsibility and some support. Family policies in the Netherlands’, in I. Ostner and Ch. Schmitt (eds.), Family Policies in the Context of Family Change. The Nordic Countries in Comparative Perspective, Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften: 155-174. Knijn, T. and Van Wel, F. (2001), ‘Careful or lenient: Welfare reform for lone mothers in the Netherlands’, Journal of European Social Policy, 11 (3): 235-251. Kremer, M. (2007), How Welfare States Care. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Le Bihan, B. and Martin, C. (eds.) (2008), Working and Caring for elderly parents in six European countries, Report for the DREES/MIRE. McGinnity, F. and Calvert, E. (2009), ‘Work-life conflict and social inequality in Western Europe’, Social Indicators Research, 93: 489-508. Merens, A., van den Brakel, M., Hartgers, M. and Hermans, B. (2011), Emancipatiemonitor 2010, Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau/Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, Den Haag, February 2011. OECD (2008), Economic Survey of the Netherlands. Coping with labour shortages: How to bring outsiders back to the labour market? January 2008. Palier, B. (ed.) (2010), Goodbye to Bismarck? Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Pascale, P., den Dulk, L. and van der Lippe, T. (2009), ‘The effects of time-spatial flexibility and new working conditions on employees’ work-life balance: The Dutch case’, Community, Work and Family, 12 (3): 279-297. Pfau-Effinger, B. (1998), ‘Culture or structure as explanations of differences in part-time work in Germany, Finland and the Netherlands?’, in J. O’Reilly, and C. Fagan (eds.), Part-time Prospects: An International Comparison of Parttime Work in Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim, London: Routledge: 177-198. Plantenga, J. (1993), Een afwijkend patroon. Honderd jaar vrouwenarbeid in Nederland en (West)Duitsland [A deviant pattern. Hundred years of women’s work in the Netherlands and (West) Germany]. Amsterdam: SUA. Plantenga, J. (2002), ‘Combining work and care in the Polder Model: An assessment of the Dutch part-time strategy’, Critical Social Policy 22 (1): 53-71. Pommer, E. and Eggink E. (2010), Publieke dienstverlening in perspectief [Public services in Perspective]. Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau.

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Portegijs, W., Hermans, B. and Lalta, V. (2006), Emancipatiemonitor 2006. Veranderingen in de leefsituatie en levensloop [Emancipation Monitor 2006: Changes in the Life Situation and Lifecourse]. Den Haag: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. Putten, A.E., Vlasblom, J.D., Dykstra, P.A. and Schippers, J.J. (2010), ‘The absence of conflict between paid-work hours and the provision of instrumental support to elderly parents among middle-aged women and men’, Ageing & Society, 30: 923-948. Tyrkkö, A. (2002), ‘The intersection between working life and parenthood: A literature review’, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 21: 107-23. Van der Lippe, T. (1993), Arbeidsverdeling tussen mannen en vrouwen. Een interdisciplinaire studie naar betaald en huishoudelijk werk binnen huishoudens, Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers. Van Wel, F. and Knijn, T. (2006), ‘Transitional phase or new balance?: Working and caring by mothers with young children in the Netherlands’, Journal of Family Issues 27 (5): 633-651. Visser, J. and Hemerijck A. (1997), A Dutch Miracle. Job Growth, Welfare Reform and Corporatism in the Netherlands, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Visser, J. (2002), ‘The first part-time economy in the world: a model to be followed?’, Journal of European Social Policy, 12 (1): 23-42. Yerkes, M. (2009), ‘Part-time work in the Dutch welfare state: the ideal combination of work and care?’, Policy and Politics, 37 (4): 535-552.

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3 Negotiating gender equality, atypical work hours and caring responsibilities The case of Sweden Sofia Björk, Ulla Björnberg and Hans Ekbrand

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1

Introduction

This chapter looks at the possibilities of reconciling paid work and the care of young children and elderly parents in situations where employees are subjected to increasing expectations of availability for both work and family life. Our analytical focus is on the impact of ongoing care policy changes and labour market transformations on gender equality in the negotiation of care responsibilities within families. In Sweden, as in many other countries, time pressure or stress among employees has become a heavily debated topic in recent times. In particular, the role of flexible working and non-standard work hours in the generation of differential time pressures has been extensively discussed (Grönlund 2004; Larsson & Sanne 2007). In the next section of this chapter, we examine the interplay of the different aspects of the problem in the context of recent developments in the care of old people and children in Sweden. The third section investigates how care practices are actually negotiated between siblings caring for their elderly parents and between couples arranging childcare. The final section analyses the impact of caring ideals on the amount of pressure experienced in care commitments.

2 Policy developments in the care of children and old people In Sweden, care services are provided primarily by the municipalities and the county councils. Since the 1980s, however, notions associated with the ‘new public management’ philosophy have made their way into public policy thinking, with the result that many tax-funded public services – including care provision – have since been outsourced to private providers. The arguments in favour of the new reforms have emphasised not only cost efficiency but also notions such as ‘free choice’ and

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‘user democracy’. The expectation has been that the purchase of services from the private sector will have a positive impact on the growth of private services, opening up new markets and creating new jobs (Socialstyrelsen 1994, 2001).

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2.1 Trends in the care of old people Despite the growing numbers of old people in Sweden, the number of individuals receiving municipally-provided care services has decreased over the past 20 years (Larsson & Szebehely 2006). Resources are today concentrated on individuals with significant care needs, while those with less severe or acute needs are increasingly expected to arrange for their care through close family members. There also seems to be a growing assumption that the demand for services for old people is best met through the purchase of services in the free market. Such changes in thinking reflect economic and political concerns and are manifested in new ways of organising care. Due to expectations of future financing problems, for instance, the government has proposed that care provision be made to follow a certain basic model in which the public-sector input is complemented with purchases from the private sector as well as informally provided care services (Borg 2009; Långtidsutredningen 2008). The modifications to the system have also led to tightened social-service eligibility criteria and to new ways of encouraging personal (private) purchase of care. In publicly-provided care for old people, needs assessment has been separated from the practical delivery of services. The ordering of services is highly detailed and standardised and is based on time units calculated for the different tasks – a circumstance that can create tensions between the various actors involved (Hjalmarsson 2009; Hjalmarsson, Norman & Trydegård 2004). As a consequence of this practice, home service delivery has become detached from the total needs situation of the care receiver (Szebehely 2006; Sörensdotter 2008). In addition, needs assessment also entails considerations as to whether the needs can be met in other ways, mainly through the ability of close family members to provide help and services. While close family members are not obliged by law to provide care, they are involved in the negotiations around the process. Indeed, an increasing number of municipalities have today developed guidelines for the investigation of the potential support that close family members could provide and on how to negotiate such possible support provision with relatives (Sand 2007; Socialstyrelsen 2003). Although care services are publicly financed, there is a fee attached to them whose amount depends on the available means of the individual receiving the care. The fees are determined by the municipalities, with a maximum limit set by the government. In addition, or as a complement, various financial options such as tax deductions have been introduced to help secure care provision for individuals through the market.

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Studies of care for old people show that the number of individuals – both men and women – requesting public assistance with household tasks has decreased significantly in Sweden. At the same time, purchases of private services as the sole source of support have gone up only marginally, covering no more than approximately 5 per cent of the country’s population aged 80 or over (Larsson & Szebehely 2006; Sköld & Heggeman 2011). In particular, women aged 80 and over who live alone are today utilising care services far less frequently than before, obtaining the support they need from close relatives instead. Different explanations have been offered for this general trend, among them the improved health and increased physical mobility of the older population. Nevertheless, as the estimates indicate, factors such as these and the increased involvement of men in household work can account for no more than approximately one-half of the overall decrease in service usage (Batljan & Lagergren 2000). Another explanation put forward in this context is linked to the perception of rights. The right to receive social services and home care is a soft claim right, and as such, its exact content is influenced by the political context in which this and other rights are defined and implemented. It could thus be assumed that, in the general climate following the country’s economic crisis of the 1990s and the subsequent cuts in welfare services and social spending, people simply adjusted their expectations of what their right to receive services means in relation to the prevailing situation. In addition, and perhaps linked to this change, there seems to have been a shift towards expecting more from close relatives, and not only within the household (from one’s partner) but also from family living outside the household – in particular, adult daughters and sons. Yet another reason for the decreased demand for publicly provided care seems to have to do with the fees charged for the services, which are often perceived to be too high. Finally, it has been suggested that the quality of the services provided has declined. According to critics, these services have become standardised and restrictive; there is, moreover, a high turnover of service staff, and old people in particular feel uncomfortable with constantly changing personnel coming and going into their homes. All in all, then, universalism as a basic principle seems to be eroded by the less generous service provision. Individual independence is being replaced by familialism, and the goal of independence is yielding to de facto encouragement of interdependence as public support becomes increasingly complemented by private support. As a result, the logic of public responsibility in the provision and distribution of welfare services is becoming increasingly mixed with the logic of the market and of familialism. Given the existing economic inequalities among old people that leave women and those who are foreign-born with lower incomes than men and native-born citizens (Larsson 2006), the growing dependence on services purchased in the market might then thus only exacer-

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bate those inequalities in the form of variable quality of services for old people. What thus far has not been brought up in public policy debates in Sweden, however, is the question of how to reconcile the responsibilities of caring for old people with those of paid work, an issue left largely unexamined also by the research community. One might, however, safely assume that many of the obstacles faced by individuals in making a career or trying to advance in their jobs are due to the difficulty of enrolling in on-the-job training programmes, travelling and working full-time while caring for relatives. When adult children take on care responsibility for their elderly parents, therefore, they risk financial disadvantage both as employees today and as retirees tomorrow, given that, in Sweden as in many other countries, the amount of a person’s retirement pension is calculated based on lifetime employment earnings. Gender equality in family care looms large as an issue in these developments. Studies on family support for old people in Sweden show not only that women provide personal care and household work for their ageing parents more frequently than men (20 per cent of the women and 15 per cent of the men in the population do so), but also that women spend more time providing care (Szebehely & Ulmanen 2009). While there may be a growing political awareness of the increased role that family members today play in the provision of care for old people, there are as yet few laws to regulate the conditions and consequences for caregivers who combine caregiving with paid employment. A 2009 law, for example, makes it mandatory for Swedish municipalities to support informal caregivers to old people while leaving it up to the municipalities to define the kind of support that should be given. In this regard, it has been proposed that support to municipally-employed family caregivers should importantly include the coordination of services to alleviate the need for their time-consuming planning and control activities (Sand 2010; see below).

2.2 Trends in childcare In the country’s current childcare policy, too, arguments of free choice and cost efficiency have encouraged private provision with public financing. In the use of paid parental leave, mothers continue to take up the lion’s share of the total allotted leave days that the parents can split between themselves despite policy measures introduced to encourage more equal sharing between the genders. Out-of-home childcare continues to be primarily publicly provided, even though the number of private providers has increased steadily since 1995. Of all pre-school age children, approximately 19 per cent are today enrolled in private childcare. The provision of pre-school education (for children aged one to six years) has expanded continuously since the 1970s. In the 1990s, childcare was transferred to the authority of the Ministry of Education, with

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education and curricula becoming of central importance in the care of children. The quality of the pre-schools, however, has remained a muchdebated topic, especially following the economic crisis of the 1990s, with the debates focusing on quality measures such as group size and child/ staff ratios. Group sizes have indeed increased – from an average of 14.4 children in 1990 to 16.8 in 2009 for both small and older children – as has the average child/staff ratio, from 4.4:1 to 5.3:1 during the same period. Another quality aspect that has been considered highly important is staff education. Currently, approximately 54 per cent of all staff in publicly operated pre-schools in Sweden have a university or a college degree qualifying them as pre-school teachers, while 44 per cent are certified childminders; in privately operated preschools, staff qualification levels tend to be lower (Skolverket 2010). In Sweden, municipalities are obliged by law to provide childcare services (pre-schools) to parents who ask for them. Public childcare is extensively developed, and its popularity has increased steadily over the years. In 2009, 79 per cent of all children aged one to three and 98 per cent of all children aged four to five were enrolled in formal childcare (Skolverket 2010). Public childcare for parents working atypical work hours, however, is more difficult to arrange, since childcare centres normally operate during regular office hours only (7 a.m. to 6 p.m.). More than half of the country’s municipalities offer no childcare during atypical hours (Skolverket 2007). The increased demand for childcare services during atypical work hours might thus open up room for other solutions to childcare. Public subsidising of privately provided childminding services, for instance, has been made possible by a new law on domestic services. Parents can now purchase services like collecting children from the pre-school and bringing them home or taking them to organised leisure activities, or having a childminder stay with them at home until the parents return from work. Other ways to complement public childcare include enlisting one’s grandparents, using an au pair, or hiring a private nanny. Since 2005, Swedish municipalities have been able to grant parents a childraising allowance that can be used to purchase care from private providers, or to provide care within the household itself when the child is not enrolled in public childcare. The possibilities for parents to arrange their children’s care as they wish have thus been increased even further. The allowance, however, is very small (approximately 300 euros per month and per child before tax), and it is not used extensively (Regeringen 2011).

3 Family care in practice How, then, do parents with atypical working hours reconcile work and care within the framework of the changing institutional care provision as

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described above? Publicly provided care is one of several factors that family caregivers take into consideration when planning and making practical decisions about their caregiving role. Their perceptions of the quality of publicly provided care, and their gendered relations with their coparents and siblings, will thus largely determine the arrangements that are made, as we will argue below. To understand commitments in family care, one needs to identify what distinguishes a main caregiver. Being the main caregiver means being the one who sees to it that the care arrangement as a whole is working, which may then also involve asking others for help. While main caregivers in both childcare and care for old people tend to be predominantly women, more men are involved in caring for children than in caring for old people. Fathers frequently share the responsibility for their children with the mothers but only very seldom act as the main caregivers for them. For old people, on the other hand, the relatively fewer men who are involved in the care arrangements tend more often to be the main caregivers. In caring for old people, the main caregivers may have siblings in relation to whom their role as main caregivers is defined, while in childcare the main caregiver is defined in relation to the other parent. How do main caregivers understand their own role as main caregivers, and what kind of problems do they face when challenging the unequal distribution of caring responsibilities that the role assignment entails? To examine these questions, we interviewed 36 family caregivers, 19 of whom were involved in caring for their parents and 17 in caring for their children. The study participants were recruited through either their workplace or the public pre-school their child was attending. Of those caring for their children, six were men and 11 were women; approximately half of them came from the professional middle classes while the rest were of either working-class or lower-middle-class background. Of those involved in caring for old people, seven were men and 12 were women, coming mostly from a middle-class background. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analysed using open coding to identify common themes within and across the two groups of interviewees as analysed below.

3.1 Caring for parents In this section we analyse in detail two personal accounts that illuminate how adult children become main caregivers for their parents, concluding with a summary of the main tasks and challenges of the role. The two examples contrast with each other in many respects such as the caregiver’s gender, the availability of siblings willing to share in the responsibility, and the ease with which the caring role could be fulfilled. At the same time, the two accounts show significant similarity in that they both

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build on the notion of women as ‘natural’ primary caregivers, with men representing merely an exception in this role. Of the two cases, Helén, who worked as a manager in the public sector, gave a typical description of how female rather than male siblings tend to become – and remain – main caregivers. In the following quote, she discusses why it was not her brother but she herself who was the main caregiver for their mother:

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Well, he’s a carpenter, so he does these specific things. He repairs the roof, and then when he’s done with that, he’s done, you know. But these daily things like shopping, which I do, and I guess I haven’t even asked him, but I – he probably doesn’t have it in the back of his mind the same way I always do, that ‘Is there anything mom might need?’ … In any case it’s me who takes care of mom’s everyday needs, and then he does those things that I can’t do … We didn’t really decide about it. It’s more like I just don’t like to nag. I could call him up and say that now you go take her to the supermarket, but – nah, I need to go shopping once a week myself and it’s just nice if she comes along, so … He needs to take care of all that, of course, when we [Helén and her husband] are out of town, in our summerhouse. Then we’re gone for four weeks or so.1

In this quote, Helén makes it clear that the main responsibility for their mother rested on her and not on her brother. Her account also suggests that explicit negotiations were of no great importance in the relationship between the two siblings: the way the responsibilities were implicitly defined in the family made even the idea of engaging in explicit negotiations sound like ‘nagging’ to her. The same implicit definitions then also prompted Helén to take on the responsibility to ensure that her brother performed the tasks to which he had explicitly agreed. Helén’s statement indicates that her brother maintained the unequal division of work in the family by refraining from taking responsibilities or any initiative of his own. In Helén’s view, he – unlike Helén herself – did not have his mother’s needs on his mind in his daily life. By describing her brother in this way, Helén also made it impossible for herself to hand over any new responsibilities to him, owing to his inability to recognise needs. However, not recognising what needs to be done might have also been an unconscious choice by the brother, given how effective it is as a strategy for avoiding commitments – as noted by both Björnberg and Kollind (2005) and Holmberg (1993). Helén also felt that her brother avoided acting on the responsibilities he had accepted, leaving her with the additional responsibility of having to ensure that her brother actually followed through with his commitments. Because of this, she preferred to do the tasks herself instead of asking her brother for help. As Helén thus took on the main responsibility for caregiving, her brother’s ability to choose what he wanted to do (and not do) to help his mother only increased. When doing so, more-

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over, he seems to have proceeded based on a gendered notion of tasks, only selecting those tasks that were ‘male’ and extraordinary in character, such as repairing the roof. While on vacation, Helén trusted her brother to act as a substitute caregiver. This, however, does not appear to have convinced her (or him) of his competence and reliability as a caregiver able to take on responsibility also when she was around and available herself. Among our interviewees, there was only one male caregiver with female siblings who had the main responsibility for an elderly parent. Explaining why his mother preferred being cared for by him instead of his sisters, Ingvar, who worked as an engineer, stated:

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Ingvar: [W]hen she [his mother] thinks that she can’t cope with things she usually asks – yes, primarily me, for help then. Interviewer: Do you have any idea why she turns to you? Ingvar: Yeah [laughing]; I have a good theory about it, yes. My oldest sister is – well, when she visits our mother, she tells our mother what she should do: ‘Why don’t you do this, and why don’t you do that?’ and ‘This is what you should do’ – things like that. But when I go see her, I just talk to her without telling her what she should do; you know what I mean?

As a male main caregiver, Ingvar was an exception, a case that needed an explanation. Ingvar himself had already given this some thought, having developed ‘a good theory’ about it, since more often it seems to be the case that men become main caregivers only when there are no sisters around to assume the role. The two examples of Helén and Ingvar illustrate the social processes involved in the division of labour and responsibility within a close family circle where one person, usually a woman – a daughter or a daughter-inlaw – becomes the main caregiver. When the care needs are less intense or complex, the role might be experienced as entailing little pressure, but as the needs of the parent being cared for increase, the pressure on the main caregiver also increases. Compared with the other countries in this book, the Swedish sample had relatively low care needs, and in the cases where the care needs were higher, the extent of publicly provided care was also high. What this meant was that, compared with the situation elsewhere, our interviewees spent a relatively low number of hours per week on caring. Nevertheless, even when the parents received significant help from the municipal home care service, they also received direct care from family members, with the primary responsibility for the well-being of the parent resting with a family caregiver. The public system of care in these cases seemed to only accept responsibility for certain specific, narrowly defined tasks, and when the provision of care for some reason failed, the family caregiver had to step in to ensure that the care needs were met. In other words, any reductions in publicly provided care

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meant increased time commitment by the family caregivers, a point we will return to below. In the cases we studied, being the main caregiver for one’s elderly parent also entailed having to assess the need for publicly provided care for old people and evaluate the quality and adequacy of the services received. The initiative for requesting publicly provided care was usually taken not by the elderly parents but by their children, and in many cases required some persuasion before the parents could accept the idea of outside help. Furthermore, when eventually received, the publicly provided services also had to be monitored by the family caregivers. This was made most obvious in cases where such monitoring led to further action, as happened with one family caregiver who cancelled a municipal home care arrangement after finding out about the numerous mistakes made by the care service staff. Monitoring, however, also included acting as a backup in case the outside care provision failed. In one case, for example, the elderly parents had been given an emergency alarm to enable them to receive rapid help from the service staff in case of an accident, but the parents routinely called their child instead, who then had to instruct them about how to use the alarm. The impact of the caregiving on the family caregivers’ working hours was generally small: few of the interviewees had reduced their working hours to be able to fulfil their caring responsibilities, with most of them managing to continue working full-time. Working atypical hours was not seen as a problem, either. The most significant aspect of one’s working hours was considered to be whether they were flexible or not. The caregivers who had some flexibility in determining their weekly work schedule could more easily adapt their working hours to the needs of the person being cared for so as to help them with, for instance, transportation to, and assistance during, appointments with medical professionals.

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3.2 Caring for children As in most countries, care of children at home in Sweden is unequally shared between the parents. Gender equality, to be sure, is advancing, but slowly. Recent time use statistics show that in 2010, women shouldered 61 per cent of all the caring work in families with pre-school-age children, compared to 63 per cent ten years earlier (Statistiska centralbyrån 2001, 2011). For the interviewees caring for children in our study, atypical work hours presented a more complex challenge than for those caring for their parents, especially when both parents had to make an effort to coordinate their working hours to suit the caring needs. The division of labour in these cases, moreover, resulted in an arrangement where one of the parents, usually the mother, became the main caregiver with the responsibility to determine which needs had to be met and how, and to ensure that someone was there to handle the task. It could also some-

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times happen that the child had to be left on his or her own to look after him or herself. This was markedly more often the case in single-parent families, where the parents were often forced to leave their children alone at home while at work, while still monitoring them from a distance. This was also how our interviewees Carl and Olivia, both of whom worked in the service sector earning relatively low wages, had solved their own childcare problems. Carl, a divorced main caregiver for two sons aged 11 and 13, often worked from noon to 9 p.m., during which time he stayed in contact with his sons via his phone and/or computer. Carl: In the afternoon, I tell them to call me on my cell phone and he [the youngest son] usually calls at around 1:30 or 2 PM, saying ‘I’m at David’s’ or something; I then say ‘OK, you’ll leave from there and be home by six o’clock’, and he’ll do that … Interviewer: And do they go to bed on their own, too, or do they wait until you get back home? Carl: Yes, the younger one, he might be in bed by the time I arrive. He should be there by then; hopefully he’ll even be sleeping. He’s supposed to be in bed by nine. Interviewer: Do you call home to check up on them? Carl: Nah, not really; I notice – I have a computer at work so I can see if they are logged into MSN. If the youngest son is there, then I know he’s sitting at the computer, playing or chatting with friends or whatever it is that he does there.

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Carl appeared rather comfortable with this arrangement in which his two sons took care of each other. Olivia, in contrast, who was a single mother of only one child (aged 10), had to involve other caregivers when working atypical hours or trust in her daughter’s ability to manage on her own, which was a constant source of anxiety for her: [When I work evenings,] then I’m not there when she comes home from school, and I won’t be there until 8:15 p.m., either. When the evenings are still light, she manages on her own; otherwise my partner [who lives 20 km away] can sometimes be there, or she goes to my sister, or she can be with me at work, or we plan for her to stay at her friend’s place … But you’re always worried that it won’t work out. If I need to work until 9 p.m., then she has to come and stay with me at work. She won’t manage alone that late, when it gets dark. Eight o’clock is fine, because her friends are out playing till then, so she won’t need to be alone.

Olivia had no stable caring solution for her evenings, so whenever she worked late into the night, she had to come up with an ad hoc solution or bring her daughter along with her to work.

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On the other hand, two of the interviewed mothers – Elinor, a flight attendant, and Hanna, a sales clerk, both of whom lived with their partners – stated that atypical working hours had served them well, but only as long as the children were young enough not to have started school. During those early years, the parents could care for their children when they were off work on weekdays, compensating for their absence during the evenings and weekends that they worked. When the children grew older, however, they had to be at school on weekdays even when the parents were off work and working evenings and weekends instead, which severely limited the parents’ possibilities for caring for and spending time with their children. Working outside of normal hours thus became considerably less family-friendly for these parents when their children started elementary school. For this reason, both Elinor and Hanna stated that they were looking for another job/position in which they could work more regular hours. For parents with small children, unpredictable or irregular working hours often mean sudden dependency on other childcare providers. Some of the interviewed parents regularly worked on-call, leaving them with unpredictable working hours but also time when they did not need to leave home. Work schedules including on-call shifts tended to be particularly problematic, especially when they already contained atypical working hours. This was the case with an interviewed airline pilot who, while being on-call, sometimes had to leave suddenly for work very early in the morning. However, the semi-public childcare services specialising in atypical working hours that the pilots in our study tended to use in such situations proved flexible enough to accommodate the pressing needs of even these cases. In the interviews with parents involved in childcare, one of the prominent themes to emerge was the need for the parents to negotiate workrelated absence from home during atypical hours. In the following quote, Hanna describes such negotiations she had with her partner, who was self-employed and often absent from home for work-related reasons: Hanna: I want him to travel less for work, and he wants that too, but his studio doesn’t generate enough income, so he has to travel, he has to say yes to all the job offers he gets. He just can’t say no to a job. Interviewer: But still, you’ve had some discussions, so you’ve disagreed over something, right? Hanna: Yes; sometimes I think maybe he should just give it all up and get a regular job instead [laughter], so he could spend some more time at home, you know. Interviewer: Couldn’t he find regular employment as a sound technician? Hanna: Yes, but that’s not stimulating enough for him, or, it’s not what he wants to do. He could work for the opera or a theatre or something. Or he could work for another studio maybe. But when you’ve gotten this far, you wouldn’t want to give it all up. Most often it works OK. But then you’ll have

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these outbursts. You’re trying to be strong but … [laughter]. And then it turns into nagging.

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In these kinds of negotiations, whose importance the interviewee above downplayed as ‘nagging’, the male parent’s need for a stimulating job and success outside the home appeared to be frequently weighed against the need for him to spend more time with the family. Characteristically, such needs were then established as an overriding concern that was then used as an explanation for why fathers were not the main caregivers at home. In Hanna’s case, too, none of her negotiations thus far had led to a reduction in her partner’s absence from home for work-related reasons. Hanna, for her part, was busy planning to leave her current position as a sales clerk to find another job where she would not have to work in the evenings when the child started school. In keeping with the findings of Bekkengen (2002), our male interviewees’ engagement in parenting still seemed to involve a significant element of choice. Their ability to choose the degree of their parental involvement appeared to be founded on the notion that the main responsibility for children and household work more naturally belonged to mothers. When the men chose not to spend very much time caring for their children, there was almost always a mother there who would step in and ensure that the needed care was given. This gendered view of parenting roles, however, only became evident when comparing the arguments put forth by the two partners. Typically, the fathers’ work arrangements involving atypical hours were, implicitly without any express agreement, made possible by mothers taking care of the children’s needs when the fathers were hindered by their work commitments. Some of the interviewed mothers but none of the fathers also reported that they had turned down job offers for better positions because of their extensive caring responsibilities at home. Hanna had even asked to be transferred to a lower-level position so as to cut down on her need to work overtime: Interviewer: Do you sometimes have to work overtime or stay longer at work? Hanna: Very rarely nowadays. But before, when I was in a higher position with more responsibilities, it happened quite often. But that was too much strain for me. Interviewer: So you actually sought a lower position? Hanna: Yes, because it was too difficult for me to … to manage otherwise, with the kid and all. I don’t regret that at all.

The general pattern among our interviewees – that mothers to a greater extent than fathers let their childcare responsibilities take priority over work – is in line with findings from previous research. As Elvin-Nowak (1998) has found, for instance, it is easier for working fathers than for working mothers to think of themselves as good parents. Caught in their

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feelings of guilt for not spending enough time with their children, working mothers with flexible schedules can then find it more difficult than fathers to find a balance between their work and family lives. At the expense of their own professional lives, these working mothers – more often than the fathers – strive to reduce the amount of time their children spend in childcare. At the same time, there were also couples where fathers and mothers shared caring responsibilities more equally. An engineer couple we interviewed provided an example of notably gender-equal parenting. The atypical hours that both of the partners worked were a result of their high level of influence on their respective work schedules combined with their mutual wish to provide their children with afternoons spent with one parent rather than in childcare. Their solution was thus shift parenting, where both of the parents worked an equal number of hours outside home, with the atypical working hours thus functioning as the solution rather than the problem.

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4 Experience of pressure through caring ideals In trying to understand the different levels of pressure experienced by the caregivers, we found that what was important was not only the concrete workload in terms of the number of hours worked and the magnitude of caring commitments, but also the caring ideals held by those involved. These ideals were shaped by gendered societal norms stipulating what constituted good parenthood and good care for old people. In care arrangements for both children and old people, caregivers tended to experience significant pressure when feeling left alone with their responsibilities. They often felt that the care arrangement was deficient in one respect or another and that they were not able to meet even all of the basic needs of those they were caring for, which then left them feeling inadequate. The sense of isolation in one’s responsibilities was, however, not always due to practical circumstances like being the only child of one’s ageing parents or a single parent. In most cases, it was related to the negotiated care arrangement through which family members had – explicitly or implicitly, and in relation to societal understandings of caring responsibilities, family history and caring ideals – effected their mutual division of responsibilities (see also Finch & Mason 1993). Expectations of caring responsibilities were generally gendered, which then shaped both the negotiations and the resulting practices (cf. Miller 2005, 2011; Risman 1998).

4.1 Emotional responsibilities in caring for old people Negotiations over caring responsibilities did not only concern practical caring needs, however; they were also about responsibilities and moral

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ideals regarding the emotional needs of the persons being cared for. When talking about their care arrangements, the interviewed caregivers’ attitudes towards their responsibilities seemed to depend upon whether they considered care to be mainly a practical responsibility to look after daily necessities (medication, shopping, housework, etc.) or mainly an emotional commitment to the care receiver. The distinction between practical and emotional responsibility is no more than an analytical one, however, and there was nothing to suggest that any of the caregivers interviewed might have lacked personal feelings for their cared-for family members. All the caregivers appeared to care deeply about those under their responsibility, although their notions about where their responsibilities began and ended differed. Practical responsibilities were usually relatively straightforward and clear-cut, and other actors could be more easily involved to create a satisfactory care arrangement. However, those who considered the emotional needs of the persons they care for their main responsibility almost always felt that they could have been there for the care receiver more than they currently were, to give them more time and love. The emotional responsibility was felt to be boundless and, as a result, the caregivers often spoke of their feelings of inadequacy and guilt. The emotional responsibilities frequently became individualised responsibilities, since the caregivers had to learn to know and understand the persons they cared for in order to be able to meet their caring needs. Hence one caregiver could not be easily substituted for another, especially not for a professional care service provider from outside the family. Taking on an emotional responsibility thus usually also meant making oneself the lone caregiver. For the three men in our sample who shared responsibilities for care with their siblings, emotional care did not appear to be part of the moral obligations they assumed for themselves or something that was even expected from them based on societal norms. Yet, even though care for old people to a high degree remains generally gendered and most caregivers tend to be women, one interesting finding in our study was that the three sons who were the lone caregivers for their elderly parents did in fact take on emotional responsibility as well. When emotional needs were evident and the caregiving men had no other family members to turn to for the fulfilment of those needs, they took on this responsibility themselves. Charles, who was the sole caregiver for his elderly mother, described his understanding of emotional responsibility as follows: Interviewer: How many hours a week do you spend caring for your mother? Charles: Maybe three or four. First shopping, and then maybe I pay her a visit or invite her to my place. I guess I should put in more hours for that, in fact. You get a bad conscience because she’s quite lonely. Interviewer: Do you feel you should be there for her more?

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Charles: I do, yes. Interviewer: Do you feel that you would want to be there more? Charles: No [laughter]. No; she can be, you know, quite tiresome, too. She complains and says that I should go see her more often. But it’s not always so fun being there, you know, if she’s only going to be complaining about you … Interviewer: Has your relationship changed since she started needing your help? Charles: Yes. Earlier it was maybe more like you just went there and sat with her and so on – not so demanding, right? Now it’s become more like … well, it pretty much kills you, in fact, just to do all that shopping and stuff. And all that’s at the expense of seeing her, too.

While Charles felt both a practical and an emotional responsibility towards his mother, it was the emotional responsibility that gave him a bad conscience and made him feel insufficient. Since Charles’s mother was lonely and unhappy and he felt responsible for that, he could never be with her enough: there were always times when she felt lonely without him there with her. Charles and other caregivers, however, also felt that their practical responsibilities stood in the way of their ability to satisfy their cared-for family members’ emotional needs. When the practical responsibilities became exhausting, there was simply no energy left for responding to those needs. Even though publicly provided care thus could not replace the emotional care given by family members, seven of our interviewees spoke of how practical necessities prevented them from spending quality time with their elderly parents. With the ongoing downsizing of the municipal system in Sweden for the care of old people, however, increasing practical responsibilities are being placed on family caregivers who thus will have even less time and energy to commit to emotional caring. In consequence, those – usually women – who shoulder the main emotional responsibility for their family members will find themselves torn even more than before between their caring ideals and what they can in practice actually accomplish.

4.2 Caring ideals in childcare Among our interviewees involved in care for children, gender differences in parental ideals were shaped mostly by dominant discourses of good motherhood (good fatherhood does not seem to be a concern to the same extent). These, at least in Sweden, present the mother’s accessibility as something decisive for the child’s psychological well-being, and since most mothers are working, an important task for a good mother is to prevent her working life from intruding on her motherhood. At the same time, mothers must relate their motherhood to the ideal of gender equality at work and in family life. Yet, in practice, mothers still carry the

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main responsibility for childcare and household tasks and thus construct their motherhood through a notion of gender difference (Elvin-Nowak & Thomsson 2001). These contradictory ideals and experiences make it more difficult for Swedish mothers to feel content in their role as mothers. Among our interviewees, Ida, who worked as a manager in the public sector, provides a good example of how moral boundaries were constructed though caring:

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Interviewer: Why is that you have less time for your own activities than your husband? Ida: Because I drop them, because I think the children are more important. I can’t just leave the children at pre-school and then come home and use the time for myself; if you do so, then you shouldn’t have children to begin with. It’s a conscious choice. I could take more time for myself, but then I wouldn’t have a good conscience about it … If he [my husband] were to give up some of his own activities, that wouldn’t make him a better parent because his activities are so important to him, and [if he can do his own things] then he’s also nicer when he gets back home, too.

In Ida’s view, she and her husband thus did not play by the same moral rules. She herself would not have been a good parent deserving of having children if she were to first leave her children at childcare to go to work and then leave them for leisure activities again in the evening, whereas her husband’s absence from home did not affect her notion of him as a good parent to the same extent. Even though many fathers in Sweden do assume substantive caring responsibility for their children, important gender differences continue to influence ideals about parenting roles. There are many culturally accepted ways of living up to one’s role as a father, allowing one to either actively participate in the lives of one’s children or put all one’s effort into work and career-making, while mothers are always expected to put the children first (Ahrne & Roman 1997; Bekkengen 2002; Plantin 2001). The fathers in our study did not express concerns about not living up to caring ideals as clearly and as frequently as the mothers. Their apparent lack of concern for any specific ideals of ‘good fatherhood’ was evidenced by their reluctance to elaborate on how they could still be good parents despite spending significantly more time at work than the mothers. The dominant ideals of fatherhood and masculinity still place a premium on men’s breadwinning role, putting significantly less emphasis on caring and accessibility to one’s children (Aarseth & Olsen 2004; Brandth & Kvande 1998), and thus effectively lend themselves to legitimating fathers’ extensive absence from home. At the same time, the fathers did not refer to their role as breadwinners when explaining why they did not work part-time to spend more time with their children.2 There is a full-time work norm in Sweden that affects men more than women, so that very few fathers even consid-

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er working part-time (Larsson 2012). Three of our interviewed fathers claimed that the part-time option would not even be possible at their workplaces. This assessment, however, may be due to fathers not sensing a moral responsibility for their children that would force them to work less. In consequence, it is harder for them to prioritise their children and make career sacrifices such as working part-time, since they do not seem to have to do so. An important signifier of good motherhood in Sweden is the length of time children spend in formal childcare: a good mother does not allow her children to spend long days in childcare. This notion can be understood against the broader perceptions of the need for mothers to be accessible to their children (see Elvin-Nowak & Thomsson 2001). While for fathers, formal childcare provides a solution for the role conflict between work and parenting, for mothers, having their children spend a long day in childcare is a source of guilt (Bekkengen 2002). Hence, among our interviewees, it was most often the responsibility of the mothers to organise the childcare, juggle work schedules and be the first one at home to minimise the children’s time spent in childcare. As a result, they often grappled with stress and a guilty conscience both when taking care of their children and while at work. The situation of Anna, a priest with a six-year-old son, was typical in this respect: Interviewer: Why is it you and not your husband who’s looking for a more family-friendly job? Anna: It’s got to do with me being … probably feel more guilty about working so much. It’s always like that: I suffer a bit more if he [the son] has to spend long days in childcare … I feel it’s more up to me if we want him to get home early, so it’s me who has to juggle things and try and come up with something just so he gets to be at home a bit more, you know … I think he [the husband] wouldn’t mind picking him up if it was at 5 p.m. every day. But I wouldn’t feel OK about that … And that’s what makes it so tough at work: I have to get everything ready in time so I can go pick up my son, or I have to work from home, or I have to go back to work again afterwards. So this gives me a lot of trouble. But I can’t do it in any other way right now.

In some cases, even when the fathers were more involved and took on greater responsibility for their children, the mothers in certain ways still stood alone with their care commitments: they were left trying to live up to the ideals of good motherhood alone. While the fathers’ input into caregiving might not have been inconsequential, it was more important to the mothers to spend more time with their children and to be there for them as mothers. This may have been related to the motherhood ideal that presents the mother as ‘an irreplaceable person of great significance’ (Elvin-Nowak & Thomsson 2001: 415). Elinor, a flight attendant, also found herself feeling insufficient even though her children did not suffer from any lack of care from their par-

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ents. She perceived that there were certain situations where she as a mother ought to be present but, due to her atypical working hours, was simply unable to be there:

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Elinor: I feel a lot of stress because I’m away from home so much on weekends and evenings, and now that I couldn’t get time off for this show [by one of her children], I feel that I’m doing the kids a disservice, plain and simple. Even though I’m home a lot during the daytime, and even though they’ve never had to spend a lot of time in childcare, you’d still want to be at home for them for the special occasions at least. I feel like I’m letting them down a bit.

Elinor’s notion of good motherhood included spending time with the children on weekends and being able to always be there when the children had something special to show. In a similar way, atypical hours put additional strain on some of the other parents trying to live up to their parental ideals. They often felt unable to be parents in the ‘right’ way because they could not be there for their children at the times they felt they should have been. This was a feeling that Jonas shared: he suffered from a ‘bad conscience’ about neglecting his son who, in Jonas’s estimation, never got to spend any relaxing, ‘real’ weekends with his parents, who were both priests and thus almost always worked during the weekends. Yet there were also mothers who did not express having any feelings of guilt and who did not seem to have incorporated such moral notions into their own parental identity. Doris, a long-distance airline pilot with a husband who was also a pilot with a similar professional situation, is one example. At times she had to leave their children, aged four and six, in childcare on a Tuesday and would not collect them until Friday. Nevertheless, Doris never mentioned any feelings of guilt or complained that her children spent too much time in childcare. What enabled Doris to see the childcare arrangement as little more than a practical arrangement when the prevailing ideals and notions of motherhood spoke strongly of something else? Working in jobs demanding a high level of professionalism or career orientation allowed interviewees to resort to discourses presenting work as a legitimate impediment to assuming additional responsibility at home. Doris simply considered working part-time for the sake of her children an unrealistic alternative, claiming that doing so would have made her a worse pilot. Accordingly, she could speak of moral identities attached to her profession as something taking precedence over the moral notions attached to caring. Those arguing that their work constituted an absolute obstacle preventing them from committing more time to caring for their children more frequently presented childcare as primarily a practical issue. This was generally easier for fathers to do, since men’s work is still consid-

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ered more important than women’s, with the result that men’s responsibility for children continues to be largely optional as a question that is conditioned by the circumstances of their work to a far greater extent than among women. Yet, as Doris demonstrated, mothers too, by presenting themselves as committed professionals, could sometimes dilute or relativise their identity as a caregiver and thus to some degree alleviate their feelings of guilt about their identity as mothers. Nevertheless, Doris too had adapted her work arrangements – more so than her husband – to suit the needs of their children; thus, even though she did prioritise her professional career, hers was a bounded prioritisation that led her to decide to forgo many more career opportunities than did her husband.

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5 Conclusions In this chapter, we have examined how care responsibilities are negotiated and organised by family caregivers in the context of increasing demands at work and decreasing public care services. An overarching question in our analysis was: what is the impact of gender equality ideals on how care is managed and shared within families? Our findings indicate that, despite men’s increasing involvement in childcare, a certain gender inequality persists in both childcare and care for old people. Of the families involved in caring for old people, it was most often the daughters who had become the main caregivers. Overall, the care responsibilities were formed through and shaped by gendered caring identities which, reflecting broader moral ideals, generally placed higher expectations on women than on men. These identities were then crucial for the caregivers’ constructions of moral boundaries that determined, for them, an acceptable care arrangement, and thus also the boundaries of their own responsibilities, with repercussions for how they organised their time. The interviews provide evidence of a risk that the new circumstances of provision of care for old people may render the division of responsibility between the state and the extended family less clear-cut, and that close family may consequently be exposed to added stress in situations where the cared-for family members’ emotional well-being is not adequately attended to. As municipalities in Sweden still have the ultimate responsibility to see to it that citizens’ rights are upheld, the public authorities increasingly take on the role of administrators and supervisors of the care providers’ work. At the same time, however, the fragmentation of the care-providing system – both within the municipalities themselves and in the relation between the municipalities and the companies operating in the care market – tends to erode this responsibility of the state. In practice, then, the increasing public supervision of care providers does not seem to have resulted in any unburdening of the fa-

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mily caregivers. On the contrary, as became obvious in the interviews for this study, the latter often feel a need to monitor and ensure that the publicly provided care is in fact delivered as contracted. This was the case for some of our interviewees to such an extent that they felt it easier to provide the care themselves. Atypical working hours presented themselves as an important factor behind the experience of pressure among our interviewees, especially in the case of single parents and parents who worked on call. The way the commitments to the frail elderly parent and to the children were experienced, moreover, only added to this sense of pressure. Emotional responsibility for the well-being of the cared-for family members, the feeling that these responsibilities belonged to oneself more than to others, and a sense of isolation in one’s responsibilities, all contributed to the added pressure reported by the caregivers in this study and to their feelings of inadequacy and guilt. Emotional responsibilities, in contrast to practical responsibilities, were experienced as demanding because they tended to be boundless. Acceptance of emotional responsibility, furthermore, also meant individualising the caring responsibility by making the caregiver irreplaceable in his or her role; in this way, the caregivers were left feeling even more alone in their responsibility. The sense of being solely responsible for care, in turn, made care arrangements vulnerable. The emotional responsibilities assumed by women are thus potentially part of the explanation of why they continue to carry the main responsibility for caring tasks in practice, even when that responsibility remains formally gender-equal. Affected by caring ideals that make them more inclined to assume emotional responsibility, women feel that they have to take on tasks that no one else is willing to shoulder lest their reluctance to do so comes back to haunt them in the form of a bad conscience or feelings of inadequacy. Downsizing public care thus has negative consequences for gender equality, in that any transfer of responsibilities from public care providers to families tends to mean transferring them further onto the shoulders of women, who will then only become increasingly burdened by their feelings of guilt about their own inadequacy and their unsatisfactory care arrangements.

Notes 1. 2.

All translations from the original Swedish are by the authors. In Sweden, parents with children below the age of eight have a legal right to work part-time. 30 per cent of Swedish mothers and 2 per cent of Swedish fathers currently use their right to do so (Larsson 2012).

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Miller, T. (2011), Making Sense of Fatherhood: Gender, Caring and Work, Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press. Plantin, L. (2001), Män, familjeliv och föräldraskap, Umeå: Boréa. Regeringen (2011), Barnomsorgspeng, available at http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/ 11634. Risman, B.J. (1998), Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sand, A.-B. (2007), Äldreomsorg – mellan familj och samhälle, Lund: Studentlitteratur. Sand, A.-B. (2010), Anhöriga som kombinerar förvärvsarbete och anhörigomsorg, Kalmar: Nationellt Kompetenscentrum. Skolverket (2011), ‘Barn och grupper i förskolan’, 15 October 2010, available at http://www.skolverket.se/statistik_och_analys/2.1862/2.4317/2.4318. Sköld, L. and Heggeman, H. (2011), ‘RUT vanligast efter 85’, in Välfärd No. 1, Statistiska centralbyrån. Socialstyrelsen (1994), Konsekvenser av beställar-utförarmodellen (BUM) inom äldre- och handikappomsorgen, Socialstyrelsens aktiva uppföljning, Stockholm: Socialstyrelsen. Socialstyrelsen (2001), Nationell handlingsplan för äldrepolitiken, Lägesrapport 2001, Stockholm: Socialstyrelsen. Socialstyrelsen (2003), Ekonomisk prövning av rätten till äldre- och handikappomsorg, Stockholm: Socialstyrelsen. Sörensdotter, R. (2008), Omsorgsarbete i omvandling. Genus, klass och etnicitet inom hemtjänsten, Göteborg and Stockholm: Makadam. Statistiska centralbyrån (2001), Tidsanvändningsundersökningen 2000, table B:9, available at http://www.scb.se/Pages/Standard____38872.aspx. Statistiska centralbyrån (2011), Tidsanvändningsundersökningen 2010, table B:9, available at http://www.scb.se/Pages/Standard____319619.aspx. Szebehely, M. (2006), ‘Omsorgsvardag under skiftande organisatoriska villkor – en jämförande studie av den nordiska hemtjänsten’, Tidskrift for Arbeidsliv, 8 (1): 49-66. Szebehely, M. and Ulmanen, P. (2009), Att ge omsorg till gamla föräldrar och andra anhöriga: Påverkar det relationen till arbetsmarknaden? Rapport till Socialdepartmentet, Stockholm: Institutionen för socialt arbete (unpublished).

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4 Caregiving and paid work in Germany The impact of social inequality Wolfgang Keck, Christina Klenner, Sabine Neukirch and Chiara Saraceno1

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1

Introduction: The intersection between the policy framework and social inequalities

Caregivers develop their care arrangements in a context shaped by many factors: the degree of caregiving needed, other caregiving and familial demands, the degree to which caregiving tasks may be shared within the family and informal networks as well as with non-family services, and conditions at work. The interaction of these multiple factors and their variability over time render each case unique to some degree. Yet the policy framework along with the individual and household socio-economic resources are powerful elements in structuring the range of available options, particularly with regard to the two dimensions that are crucial for the viability of any care arrangement, particularly when the caregiver is in paid employment: the possibility of being relieved from part of the caregiving and a degree of control over one’s own time. These factors also play an important role in diminishing or strengthening gender inequalities (Korpi 2000). In this chapter, therefore, we focus on the ways in which socio-economic conditions affect the caregiving strategies and arrangements of individuals and households in the German policy context. Social inequalities concern first of all financial resources, in the sense that they make it possible to buy care (Arber & Ginn 1992; Carmichael & Charles 1998; Sarasa 2008; Saraceno 2010, 2011). Inadequate financial resources are especially crucial in Germany because access to affordable subsidised childcare facilities is limited (though there are important regional differences), market solutions are expensive, and tax deductions for private childcare costs favour wealthier parents. Only in recent years have family policies partially shifted their focus to encourage both labour market participation and fertility, specifically with regard to highly educated mothers (Jüttner, Leitner & Rüling 2009). The provision of services has been increased through the subsidisation of childminders,2 but the increase in services has failed to cover the demand. For older

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children, the right to a place in a kindergarten does not extend to the right to a full-day service. Furthermore, the opening hours and rigid organisation of childcare often do not fit parents’ changing schedules (Esch, Klaudy & Stöbe-Blossey 2005). Elementary school, moreover, is mostly part-time. Any additional time (after-school clubs, early opening hours) must be paid for, and the quality and organisation of these services (e.g. whether or not they provide lunch) vary greatly across municipalities. When parents have the financial resources to pay for the additional care-time needed or to find a solution more suitable to their own situation in terms of quality and time organisation, it can make a vast difference to their quality of life. Similarly, in the case of care for old people, since 1995 social longterm care insurance has granted all those who have a certified degree of disability or dependency the right to receive benefits. Yet long-term care insurance is intended to cover only part of the acknowledged need (Keck & Saraceno 2010). Hence, in this case too, adequate financial resources make a difference not only for the choice of support chosen (services or money) (Greve 2009), but also for the ability of those involved to construct a care package that meets the needs of both the caregiver and the care receiver (Keck & Saraceno 2010). The co-payment for attending a daycare centre for old people with care needs five days a week, for instance, amounts to more than 1,000 euros per month. Socio-economic inequalities in financial resources and job and career prospects also determine the opportunity costs incurred when reducing working time or giving up one’s job. The higher the income and the investments to achieve and maintain one’s current job position, the less likely it is that caregivers will resign from their job or reduce their working time. Employees in low-paid jobs, however, have lower opportunity costs when reducing their time in paid work. They may, therefore, more easily accept a reduction in working time or give up their job altogether (Henz 2006). In the German case, this differential trade-off is evident with regard to both childcare and care of old people. German mothers with a university education are more inclined to be gainfully employed and have their children cared for in childcare facilities than are mothers with lower levels of education, because the German tax and social security system encourages wives who could potentially earn low wages to stay at home (Sachverständigenkommission 2011). A recent study shows that the children of mothers with a university education are three times more likely to be cared for by non-family members (Kreyenfeld & Krapf 2010). One phenomenon, however, is similar for all of the socio-economic groups: the division of labour among parents is often traditional, with fathers working full-time and doing only a few household chores, and mothers limiting their employment and bearing the main burden of housework and caregiving (Statistisches Bundesamt 2004). In the case of care for an old person, the option to take the long-term care allowance

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in cash instead of services may be an incentive for low-paid (female) workers to reduce their working time or give up their job altogether and share the household budget with the person for whom they care (Dallinger & Theobald 2008; Keck & Saraceno 2010). Social inequality also arises from work conditions. The right to work part-time, established by law in 2001, had the dual effect of increasing women’s labour force participation and confirming the gendered division of labour (Klammer & Letablier 2007). The large majority of German mothers – not fathers – work part-time (Rübenach & Keller 2011). Yet working-time demands – especially with the increasing spread of atypical hours and fluctuations of working time – frequently contradict the need for family time (BmFSFJ 2006). Furthermore, young jobholders are often employed on short-term contracts. Although these changes in the labour market affect both skilled and unskilled workers across all socio-economic classes, they have a more severe effect on those in lower-level jobs. With regard to both time schedules and organisation, workers in lower-skilled occupations are more often constrained by inflexible working hours and therefore have less control over their work schedules than do workers in higher-skilled jobs, particularly those in managerial positions. The former may also be involved in shift work which, depending on the circumstances (and the presence of other family members), may be used as an instrument for reconciling work and family (e.g. working nights in order to be at home when the children come home from school) or may be experienced as a strongly disorganising element in a complex care arrangement patchwork. Furthermore, because workers in lower-level jobs are more easily replaced than highly skilled workers, they have weaker negotiating power when trying to adjust their working schedule to meet their family needs. This factor weakens their bargaining position in asking for more flexible working hours (Blossfeld 2003; Breen 1997; Klein et al. 2000). Although there are some collective and company-wide agreements in Germany that grant some workingtime flexibility should family care responsibilities arise, family-friendly policies are still rare at the company level and within collective agreements (Klenner 2005, 2008; Klammer & Letablier 2007; Kohaut & Möller 2009). Having a managerial or highly skilled position does not, however, ensure automatic protection against having to provide care to others while working, nor does it protect more generally against work/family tensions. Some studies have indicated that workers in these positions are under higher work/performance pressures than are those in lower-level positions, as they do not feel they can afford to use the flexibility to which they are in principle entitled (Bianchi & Milkie 2010; Hochschild 1997). This kind of pressure seems to have increased in recent years (e.g. Gallie & Russell 2009; Cha 2010).

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In the following sections we analyse how the dimensions of social inequality discussed above emerge in the experience of both mothers of young children and adult children caring for an elderly parent.

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2 Combining caring for a child with paid work The empirical material for our analysis is based on three studies carried out between the years 2000 and 2009.3 We performed secondary analysis of fully transcribed interviews with fifteen mothers who had at least one child between the ages of one and twelve years in the household. We selected the individual cases on the basis of criteria that would enable us to cover different forms of flexible working hours, different professional situations and income levels, and a variety of types of family and care arrangements. Four interviewees were single mothers, a slightly higher percentage than that found in the population (see Rübenach & Keller 2011). Ten were married, and one was divorced and in a new relationship. Mothers with a university education (six) and mothers working as the main breadwinners in the family (six) are clearly over-represented in the sample, given that the latter make up only 10 per cent of all German family households with two partners (Brehmer, Klenner & Klammer 2010). The quota of mothers working full-time (half of the sample) is also higher than the average in Germany, where 30 per cent of all working mothers are in full-time work (Rübenach & Keller 2011). Furthermore, mothers living in the countryside are under-represented in the sample. The interviews were coded and analysed with the inductive-deductive method of qualitative content analysis (Witzel 2000). In this section we examine the external conditions identified as decisive for care arrangements when the interviewee has a young child: time, the childcare infrastructure, financial means and specific employment conditions (cf. Crompton 2006; BmFSFJ 2008; Jurczyk et al. 2009). Other external conditions are the availability and involvement of family members in the care arrangement (cf. Fuller 2009; Giullari & Lewis 2005). We started with the hypothesis that flexible working-time arrangements, given the present configuration of childcare facilities, together with the weak bargaining power of many employees due to high unemployment, tend to aggravate problems of reconciling work and family rather than alleviate tensions. We also hypothesised that the caregiver’s position in the social structure is important for the kind of work and care arrangement available and, consequently, for her work/life balance – or rather, work/family conflict. We address the following question in this section: to what extent do the differences in available financial means and the arrangement of one’s own working hours contribute to different opportunities to reconcile work and family and to reduce time pressures? As our sample shows, the position of the interviewees in the

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professional hierarchy plays a crucial role in the options that are available.4

2.1 Care arrangements of interviewees in high-level professional positions Women in high-level professional positions, being highly career-oriented, tend to seek non-family childcare solutions that cover a large amount of time each day. Because they have comparatively high incomes, they have the financial means to pay for private childcare themselves if no publicly provided childcare is available or if the publicly provided childcare appears to be inadequate or is too inflexible. Paula, a manager at a non-profit organisation and a single mother of an eightyear-old son, uses a comprehensive and high-quality childcare service. Although she is employed part-time, she can afford the care arrangement that she trusts most:

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I can’t stress enough how important this service is … At school, there is also an after-school club. But it doesn’t appeal to me because it’s just a place to keep your child … And it’s much more important to me than a car or a maid; I’d rather make sure my child has proper care.

Claudia, a geographer, was allocated a place in a publicly funded childcare centre for her child, yet she preferred to employ an in-home care provider who could also provide childcare when the child was ill. Now that the child is in kindergarten, she has to rely on expensive private pick-up and drop-off services in order to be available to face emergency demands in her job. Three interviewees have managed to remain in continuous full-time employment thanks to the help of publicly funded childminders with flexible care schedules, for whom they have to pay only a small fee. But for many mothers, the number of publicly funded hours is not always sufficient to cover working-time demands, and the number of available childminders and places in childcare centres does not satisfy the demand, thus forcing mothers to find private solutions. Childminders offer more flexibility than institutional services do, but mothers sometimes have doubts about the quality of care they offer. Kornelia, a social worker with a managerial position, did not find a spot in a childcare centre for her two-year-old son and thus reluctantly relies on a childminder, though she worries that the quality of care is not professional. Notwithstanding the relatively wide range of resources they can draw from, women in high professional positions face obstacles when it comes to arranging their work hours. Although they are entitled legally to reduce their working hours and in financial terms are in a better position to do so than women who earn less, they have little leeway to negotiate. Two of the university graduates turned to part-time work and have

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taken a pay cut as a result, but the actual number of hours worked by far exceeds the number of hours contracted. In a male-dominated work environment, they chose part-time work in order to limit their employers’ expectations of their time availability. None of the women in management positions in the sample thinks it would be possible to reduce their working hours. Their attitudes towards part-time employment vary, however, on promotions received in recent years (or anticipated in the coming years) and on whether their position is short-term. Nicole, a doctor with a fixed-term contract, is afraid to approach her supervisors about the possibility of reducing her hours: See, I took on this job because I got it and jobs are hard to come by. I didn’t see myself in a position to negotiate my working hours. I always thought I could maybe ask in six months’ time. What sucks is that I only have a limited contract.

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An insecure job position not only renders parents vulnerable, it also puts pressure on them not to take advantage of legal entitlements. Nicole’s husband, who is also employed temporarily, did not take parental leave because he wasn’t sure whether his contract would be extended. Kornelia, a social worker, is under extreme pressure, as she must always obtain funding for new projects in order to ensure the renewal of her contract. The ability to work longer hours is perceived as a prerequisite for promotion. The three mothers in managerial positions feel this pressure in particular. Marlies, a personnel consultant and mother of a 14-month-old son, explains how she needs to demonstrate her availability at all times in order to ‘earn’ permission to leave work in the event of a family emergency: If all else fails, then I just have to go on that day … But you can only do that if you are held in high esteem in the company and have earned it. If I were an interchangeable part, I wouldn’t be able to do all of that. It’s all about negotiating power.

Working mothers, whatever their professional position, have in theory the option to take 10 to 25 days of leave per year (depending on the number of children), with insurance covering part of the lost income should a child become ill. But managers, in particular, feel pressure to meet the demands of constant availability: Claudia: The pressure, the fear, when you stay at home now … One day the employer will say, ‘We actually need someone who is always there and 100% available’. Whenever I have to stay at home, I tell them to leave me a memo saying what has to be done and I come in the evening. I try to do the work in the evening or work at home at night.

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With a few exceptions, the illness of a child is a ‘catastrophe’. In several cases, mothers made the child’s illness ‘invisible’ to the employer, either using overtime already earned through the ‘bank of hours’ system or taking holidays. For women in managerial positions, flexibility is often won at the cost of longer working hours and weeks as well as an implicit renunciation of some of their social entitlements as parents. As a consequence, the care arrangements made by these women rely heavily on childminders (who are often in precarious situations themselves5), often in combination with institutional services and help from grandparents, and less often with the father’s help. It is notable that the parents tend to share the family work more equally when the wife holds the breadwinning position. Three of the mothers with a university education – and high wages – could count on substantial childcare support from their male partners in part-time work. In general, earning a high income only partly helps to reduce the pressure in these parents’ – and particularly mothers’ – lives, as the demands of their jobs are very high.

2.2 Childcare arrangements of interviewees in mid-level and lowlevel professional positions

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The quality and coverage of publicly provided childcare, school schedules, the lack of cafeteria services in schools, and the cost of meals weigh heavily on the opportunity costs of women in mid- and low-level professional positions. Karin, who works part-time in a mailroom, stresses how much it would cost to pay for afternoon care for her two daughters. She prefers to prepare lunch ‘with her right hand’ while trying to explain homework ‘with her left hand’ when the children return from school. Several women criticise the quality of the homework help provided by after-school clubs. Beate, a cook in a canteen, complains about the lack of supervision: OK, we’ve got the after-school club, where the kids somehow manage to hang out in huge groups at school for hours without any qualified personnel looking after them, right?

The availability of flexible working hours varied within this subgroup. Shift work is one option to compensate for shortcomings in institutional care during the afternoon, especially for single mothers who often cannot reduce their number of hours for financial reasons. This is the case for Franziska, who spends all the extra pay she receives as a nurse working the night shift to pay for an in-home caregiver for her three children at night. She has no access to any public funding for this childcare on account of her children’s ages. Nor does she have a supportive social network. In contrast, Tina and Bärbel have built their care arrangements around their family network. Both use their shifts to relieve the family

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members helping them to care for their children. Bärbel, a nurse, switched to the night shift – at the cost of her position as shift leader of her nursing team – in order to avoid having to burden her parents during the day. Working nights, however, has its costs, both for the mother’s relationship with her children and for the mother’s health. You realise you need more and more time to recover afterwards … it increases somehow. […] And during the day you do not really get anything done properly, even if it’s a day when you do not have to go back to work in the evening. […] It’s because you cannot concentrate on things. […] So I am irritable; the children are irritable.

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Tina works full-time on a shift schedule as an assistant manager in a factory. When she is at work, her young child is cared for by her sister. Up to now, her colleagues have been able to accommodate her needs by picking up the late shifts, allowing Tina to work only morning shifts. But soon she will have to return to the late shift, and she has not yet found a viable care arrangement. There are no public childcare facilities that cover working hours in the evening, and her husband, a shop owner, works until seven in the evening. She could reduce her working hours but would lose not only income but also her semi-managerial position. An extensive informal network involving grandparents, sisters and sometimes also friends is a crucial resource for many of these working mothers (Ludwig et al. 2002). When someone in the care network is not available, they have to rely mainly on colleagues and supervisors to accommodate them. At the same time, they have little room for negotiating their hours and the additional demands on their working time, given a labour market that is insecure and that offers limited options to mothers with their qualifications. Rita, a secretary, explains her fears of losing her job: Now I don’t even want to take the risk [of turning down overtime]. Once I’m out, I’ll never really be able to get back in as I’m already an old lady. […] Because they take young people who earn less.

Frequent overtime is a factor contributing to high levels of stress within this group. It results mainly from organisational deficiencies. Franziska, for instance, accumulated more than 300 hours of overtime within half a year without any opportunity to use it for family needs because there was a staff shortage in the health facility where she works. More than in the case of highly skilled women, flexibility with respect to the working hours of mid-level and low-level professional employees is decided unilaterally by the employer. When women cannot rely on family support, the care arrangements are especially fragile. Mothers usually have to reduce their working hours in addition to taking on shift work in order to reconcile family

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and paid work. This compromise solution greatly reduces their financial freedom. Beate initially employed a subsidised childminder to look after her child in the early morning. When the child turned three, the subsidy expired and Beate could no longer afford the flexible in-home caregiver; she was therefore forced to work part-time. As in the case of Bärbel and Tina, she paid a high cost professionally. Her employer did not consider part-time work compatible with holding a managerial position. Although no other employee in the canteen where Beate works had anywhere near the same level of qualifications as she did, she was always passed over when promotions were given. In Germany, part-time work implies only limited career opportunities (Koch 2008). Yet for many women in lowlevel jobs, part-time work may be the only way of combining paid work with family responsibilities. One decisive factor in the effect of flexible working hours on the work/life balance is the partner’s employment situation and the household’s gender arrangements. Women who bear all the responsibility for housework and care are under extreme pressure. Denise’s husband works for the US army and is sent abroad from time to time, leaving her alone with her three children. Interviewer: Do you have time left for yourself sometimes?

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Denise: No, I don’t have any time. I’m always dead tired. […] I don’t have any energy left to do anything. Batteries are empty.

In short, the group of women in mid-level and low-level jobs may work part-time more often than those in high-level jobs in order to relieve some of the stress. In the stories told by our interviewees, this choice appears to be more the outcome of constraints than of preferences. In any case, for them, as for the higher-skilled mothers, this decision means giving up managerial positions. Moreover, part-time work further limits the financial resources to pay for additional private childcare services, and in combination with shift work and traditional gender roles at home, it still does not lead to a good or even satisfactory work/life balance.

3 Caring for an elderly parent: Different resources and constraints For our research on caregivers of elderly parents, our analysis is based on a sample of 34 individuals who are in paid employment at least 20 hours per week and who are the main family caregivers for parents or parents-in-law who require support in the (instrumental) activities of daily living (according to the IADL/ADL scale) and/or require supervision for several hours each day. In three cases, caregivers had left their

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job shortly before the interview because they could no longer balance their work and caregiving obligations. The sample is diversified with regard to income, professional status, family circumstances and the extent of care needs. It includes only five men compared with 29 women, although a few husbands and brothers also provide considerable help even if they do not share the caregiving work equally. The interviews were carried out in eastern and western Berlin and in the rural regions of Brandenburg. The semi-structured interviews were recorded and transcribed in full and then coded. Content analysis was carried out independently by the two main researchers and then cross-checked. The analysis was aimed at: 1) identifying modes of organisation of care arrangements; 2) detecting points and patterns of care/work tensions at the workplace, in the caregiving relationship and in family relations; and 3) identifying the resources and strategies used to deal with these tensions. The analysis concerned two distinct levels: factual circumstances and perceptions and feelings. None of the caregivers we interviewed are totally alone in meeting the care needs of an elderly parent. Other family members, care services and/or informally paid help are always present. Yet the presence of these supporting resources varies greatly at the same level of need, depending not only on the caregiver’s family circumstances but also on the income of both the elderly person and the caregiver. German long-term care insurance grants public support irrespective of income and wealth but is intended to cover only part of the costs of personal care and home help on the basis of three levels of dependency. On average, it covers one to two hours of care per day. It is also rigid in terms of both time and content. There is no short-term flexibility to take account of changing care demands nor to change the daily or weekly time schedules. Furthermore, the insurance covers neither the costs of interventions aimed at keeping a person intellectually and/or physically active nor the costs incurred when the elderly person has a severe physical or mental disability and thus requires someone present at all times. All additional support must be found in the family network or purchased from the private market. In cases involving very low incomes, the care provision allowance is sometimes used to supplement the household budget; in such cases, no service is used. These differences in available resources may be offset or further intensified by the caregiver’s working conditions, in particular the caregiver’s degree of control over her working hours and the possibility of making temporary adjustments to one’s work schedule on account of an emergency at home (a constant concern among the caregivers interviewed). Not surprisingly, it was only when both the caregiver and the care recipient had low incomes that there was little or no use of services. When either the elderly parent or the caregiver household had a good income,

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some service was always used, sometimes for many hours each day and in a variety of combinations.

3.1 When multiple resources may be called upon

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When extensive use of services is possible, the time devoted by the primary caregiver to hands-on care and daily presence is greatly reduced. Nonetheless, the caregiver still spends time organising and monitoring the arrangement itself as well as the care recipient’s well-being; she also fills in when the service is not available. If the caregiver can count on the help of other family members to share the responsibilities and to help out in case of emergency, the overall arrangement is usually viable – even more so if work schedules can be arranged with enough flexibility. But if some of the pieces of this puzzle are lacking or no longer fit, even the most service-rich arrangements may be subject to strong tensions or even complete breakdown. Britta’s mother was assigned care level 26 and for many years used both home and daycare services as well as ‘meals on wheels’ while living on her own, paying for them from her own pension. Shortly before the interview, she had to move to a residential home because of her deteriorating condition. Before this move, Britta, who is a preschool teacher, spent two hours with her each day and handled emergency calls at night. Some neighbours were available for small chores, and Britta’s daughter was available in emergencies. Gesa, a director of a service agency, acts mainly as the manager of a care arrangement, while the hired care service providers – paid for from her mother’s pension – perform most of the daily tasks. In addition, Gesa can count on some family help. Although her working schedule is in theory fixed, she can arrange her working time and work tasks quite flexibly: I can arrange it. Of course, when I organise my working time, I always have in mind my situation at home. And if it becomes a necessity, I have a great team, very great colleagues with whom I can always coordinate. That works.

Gesa mentions three advantages. She has control over her working time and can schedule meeting dates and the like. Second, she has cooperative colleagues with whom she can negotiate temporary arrangements in the event of an emergency. Third, she can perform some of her work at home while keeping an eye on her mother. This flexibility clearly reduces the amount of pressure she feels. Her workload and level of responsibility are quite high, yet she sees the situation not as a problem or a burden but rather as a challenge that she and the family have accepted because of their values and preferences. The arrangement had caused some tension in the marriage, but now the couple is mutually supportive. In her words:

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I am not in the best of health, for sure, but not unhappy because we have consciously made the decision, following our moral values. My only complaint is that the day is not long enough to manage everything, and my physical energy is no longer sufficient.

Friederike, a manager, was already working part-time when her motherin-law became seriously ill. She therefore did not have to rearrange her work schedule. Her case represents one of the most complete care arrangements, rich both in services and family caregivers. Yet although her career did not suffer because of her part-time position, her young daughter did suffer from her mother’s divided attention and time once she took on the new caregiving demands. Jonas, a doctor in a hospital, has little flexibility in arranging his work time and works on call several times a month. Giving priority to the demands of his job, he restricts his care involvement to the evening hours. During the day, professional services and his sister-in-law care for his mother. The sister-in-law is also responsible in the event of an emergency. Jonas refuses to consider rearranging his working time. He says that if the care needs to be increased in the future, he will have to buy more care service time. Things have not worked out so well for all of the interviewees, however, particularly when there is no one else beyond paid services to rely on. Ute, for example, holds a university degree and works as the chief secretary for a senior manager of a big company. The company offers work-time accounts, which Ute describes in positive terms: We have flexible working time. I am able to arrange my working time for the company according to my needs. I only have to complete my working hours, 7.36 hours [per day]. But even in this regard there is some room for adjustment.

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Yet she also adds, I depend a bit on my boss. The days he is not in the office, I can decide how to arrange my working time; but the days he is there, I have to be ready.

This means working late. When that happens, she worries that something will happen to her mother when the latter returns from the daycare centre in the late afternoon. What is problematic … is in the evening. She [her mother] is back [ from the care centre] at the latest at 6 p.m., and if I am under pressure at work and I realise that, then I’m delayed. I can leave her alone for one or two hours maximum; I get very nervous because I’m afraid, because usually something happens at home.

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Furthermore, when she needs to take her mother to her frequent checkups, Ute has to use her vacation time, thus leaving very little time for rest and holiday time. Dorothe’s case is an example of very intensive use of services due to no other family support and a work schedule that is not long but somewhat at odds with that of the service providers. Her mother, who lives alone in her apartment, suffers from dementia and has been assigned care level 2. The mother receives home care twice a day, and three times a week she visits a daycare centre. On weekends and holidays, a ‘meals on wheels’ service brings her lunch. Once a week, a home helper comes to do the cleaning and keep her company for a few hours. All these services are provided only partly under the long-term care insurance. A large part is paid from the old woman’s comparatively high pension. Dorothe, who works part-time as a nurse mostly on weekends, usually visits her two to three times per week. But when the old woman is ill and cannot attend the daycare centre, Dorothe is the one who cares for her on a daily basis. Neither her husband nor her two older sons help in any way. Dorothe had to hire somebody to help her with her own household chores. The lack of support from her family and the traditional gender-specific division of labour are pressure points in Dorothe’s otherwise services-rich arrangement. The old woman remains mostly alone on weekends, even though her severe state of dementia requires continuous supervision. She is also alone at night. .

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At weekends it’s like this, because at weekends I am, as I said, at work. In the afternoon, since I get home late, it is a bit difficult, if there is nothing urgent, to go again to my mother. We try to do everything during the week.

Lack of informal support, together with an inflexible work schedule and considerable work responsibilities, eventually made it impossible for Annika to juggle all her obligations, notwithstanding a high level of service coverage for her mother with significant care needs, which she paid largely out of her own budget because her mother’s pension was too low. Annika worked as a secretary in a private medical laboratory. She was responsible for coordinating her colleagues as well as for bookkeeping. She earned a good wage, but the time and psychological pressures were very high on both the work and the care front. I finished working most of the time around half past four to five. But then I was wiped out. And then, once I sat in the metro, I started worrying: what do you need this evening? […] And then I had the constant worry: my mother has been at home since 4 p.m., waiting. And everything was arranged; really, I have – because teamwork is my job – in my private life, I have everything planned meticulously, yes. But you always have to deal with human beings, and every time something goes wrong. You cannot plan care, it’s not possi-

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ble – or only up to a certain degree. Sometimes I came home at six and my mum was sitting there, crying.

Annika tried to reduce her working time from 40 to 30 hours per week, taking some of her work home and working late in the evening. It was no use, for she was eventually fired: she had arrived late at work several times because of unexpected emergencies, and she had made a number of mistakes because she experienced difficulties concentrating. Her boss showed no understanding of her situation. Annika has decided against looking for a new job because she knows that she would earn less than before, and with a lower wage she would not be able to afford the costly care services. The inability to pay for care, therefore, has trapped Annika in unemployment.

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3.2 When overall resources are scarce When both the caregiver’s and the parent’s incomes are low, the choices are more limited. In four cases, caregivers have opted for the cash-forcare allowance and make little or no use of public services because of financial constraints. In three of these cases, the caregiver and the person receiving care have joint households and budgets. Wiebke, for example, lives with her grandmother and combines the latter’s pension with her own wages and the care provision allowance while working part-time as a nurse and studying medicine. This arrangement allows her to live in spacious accommodation that she otherwise could not afford. She stresses that, being a trained nurse, she is able to care adequately for her grandmother. But the result is that the grandmother, who is unable to move by herself, spends many hours in bed alone every day while Wiebke is at work. Ralf is an only child and cares for his mother. At the time his mother became severely disabled, he decided to have his mother live with him. Because the caregiving tasks were too demanding, he reduced his working time and thereby also his already low wages as a carpenter. His low income is offset by the care allowance and some of the pension income of his mother, but Ralf is risking the possibility that he will not be able to increase his working hours when his caregiving is no longer needed and the pension of his mother is no longer there. Yes, I worked full time before, and step by step had to reduce [my working time] to 16 hours … Because I realised that it is important, for example, to be at home on Friday. There are many things to deal with at home, and then we [he and his boss] agreed on the 16 hours. That is not much, of course.

The reasons he gives for not using services, however, are also qualitative.

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At the beginning, when my mother lived by herself, I tried care services; but I had only negative experiences. The caregivers are structured in a stupid way, to put it mildly. And they have hardly any options time-wise. Service is always graded by single care tasks. It was also the case that the caregivers who came in the morning should have spent half an hour, but after twenty minutes they got up and left.

In other cases, too, the reason given for not using state-provided services is not financial. Either the care recipient (particularly in cases of dementia) or the primary caregiver did not want strangers around, or one or both had had bad experiences with care services in the past. In all of these cases, the caregivers are under enormous time and psychological pressures. Tanja, a self-employed commercial agent, repeatedly stated that she is at her limit – that she must reduce her investment in her job, that she has no opportunity for career development, that she does not have enough time to rest or sleep and does not find enough time for her partner or for her daughter with a newborn baby. She feels highly stressed by the specific care demands ensuing from her mother’s incontinence and also worries that her mother spends too much time alone and unsupervised.

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I think it would be nice if somebody could be there all the time, but this is not feasible. It is simply too time-consuming. You always have to organise it so that she has something to do. If nobody is with her, she is alone – the sun is shining, then she goes and does something, then something silly happens – she falls down the stairs and so on. Actually, somebody should be there always.

It should be noted that such refusals to use services because they are inadequate and/or because family care ‘is better’ are found only among low-income caregivers and care recipients. This finding may suggest that there are different family cultures with respect to caregiving between social classes, but it also implicitly shows that a lack of financial resources hinders these individuals from receiving more and better care than that offered by state-provided services. Exclusive reliance on family care, in any case, often overburdens the caregiver and her family and has the added risks of the care recipient getting insufficient care. Among low-skilled, low-paid caregivers, inflexible working hours are not only more frequent but also less easily compensated. Anna works as a cleaner forty hours per week. She is so afraid of losing her job that she has never mentioned her caregiving responsibilities to her boss. Her husband, who is unemployed, stays at home with her bedridden mother (care level 3) while Anna is at work. But Anna has the responsibility for hands-on care as well as for household chores. The couple barely makes ends meet with her wages, the mother’s small pension, the unemploy-

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ment indemnity and the care provision allowance. However, the physical and psychological burdens are high, and the couple is thinking of sending her mother to a care home against her will. During the first months it worked well, but it became more and more difficult. […] The burden was enormous.

Bettina is an example of how life circumstances can negatively offset the advantages of a good starting position. In her case, being highly skilled – she has a PhD in science – did not help, because when her mother began to need care she had not yet found a secure job and she had nobody else to turn to. In order to care for her mother, Bettina down-skilled herself; she now is working part-time as a shop assistant. Her work schedule, however, is very rigid, because she has no colleagues who could cover for her in the event of an emergency. In addition, her boss has threatened to fire her if she misses work or comes in late. She has no control over her working hours: No, absolutely not; if she [her boss] has decided on a specific day, then it is fixed. On the contrary, she wants to know a day in advance if I would like to be one hour or fifteen minutes late. On this she is very strict.

And she adds: For example, when I have to take my mum to a mammography appointment, I must notify her well in advance. And it is not accepted well – always with a gnashing of teeth.

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Notwithstanding her fully unsatisfactory professional situation, Bettina does not see a way out: You always have to fear losing your job, and there are hardly any jobs today. And for somebody who is so inflexible, like me, it is very difficult.

Cohabitation of the caregiver and the care recipient may, however, also be a strategy for dealing both with caregiving and work demands and with the cost of services. This is the case for Markus, a lumberman, and his mother. Individually, their income is modest, but sharing both the household and the budget allows them to use the care allowance for a daycare service, with help from the mother’s pension. Because Markus works full-time with a fixed schedule, he can be at home when his mother is not in the daycare centre. Though he does complain about the high cost of daycare, he is able to afford the service by sharing both the household and the budget, and thus does not feel under too much pressure. He can also count on his sister for emergencies and during his holidays.

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An even more strategic use of resources is found in the case of Ayse, a single mother who works for a home-based care service. She has a rigid schedule and a relatively modest income. But Ayse is able to benefit both from the solidarity that she receives from her boss and her colleagues in the event of an emergency and from her own profession, which enables her to be paid home caregiver to her father, who lives with her. The latter also attends a daycare service that is paid for from his pension, and when he returns home he finds his young, responsible grandson who keeps him company until Ayse returns. Within a formally rigid and inflexible work environment and with a relatively modest budget, Ayse has been able to develop a reasonably flexible care arrangement.

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4 Conclusion All of the caregivers interviewed are under some kind of pressure with respect to time and loyalties. Both the parents of young children and the caregivers of elderly parents feel anxiety about the adequacy of their care arrangement and the well-being of either their children or their elderly parent. Both groups strive to achieve high-quality care in the context of a family policy that only partially supports childcare and care for elderly parents, particularly when the family caregiver is also employed. In general, combining paid employment and caregiving is a difficult exercise that receives little support from policies and even less support from employers, although in recent years ‘family friendliness’ has become a mark of distinction for an increasing number of companies.7 The points of major pressure and of perceived difficulty differ from individual to individual. For some caregivers, the main concerns are in relation to their job and care-to-work interference: how to deal with job demands or how to keep one’s job. For other caregivers, the main concern is the adequacy of the care arrangement and interference of work with their care responsibilities. With regard to working mothers of young children, the policies supporting work/care reconciliation are far from adequate not only when a child is very young – given the low coverage offered by childcare centres – but also later, when a child enters kindergarten and elementary school, as these arrangements are often part-time only, do not provide meals, and require payment for after-school hours. Only those who can count on systematic family support (usually grandparents, much less often a partner) or who have the financial means to pay for additional care, or both, may overcome the constraints from limited public support, particularly when the demands of the workplace are non-negotiable. Atypical work conditions may or may not help, depending on the situation. Shift work or part-time work may be used by workers in lower-level jobs as one component of their care arrangement, though it may come at the cost of a lack of rest and of a personal life. But part-time work represents

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a cost both in financial and in career terms. And, particularly when work contracts are temporary, it may even be highly risky. Nearly half of the mothers in our sample, and in particular those in the higher-level jobs, use childminders or in-home caregivers. All but one would have preferred institutional childcare. Reliance on childminders or in-home caregivers is thus not a product of greater choice, which was the explicit intention of lawmakers (cf. Hahn 2005; BmFSFJ 2010). Instead, it represents a lack of alternatives. These mothers have made a compromise between the quality and the availability of care, particularly when their working time cannot be planned in a methodical way and when their employers place strict demands on availability. The option of privately paid care is less feasible for mothers with lower incomes, who are more likely to weigh the costs and benefits when choosing additional care options. With regard to care responsibilities towards an elderly parent, the situations in our sample are good examples of the virtues – and the shortcomings – of German long-term care insurance. Once a person is acknowledged as having some kind of care dependency, he or she (and indirectly his or her caregivers) can count on some form of support. But this support is limited; in order to be adequate, it requires a significant amount of integrated care from the family or privately paid services. When caregivers are in paid employment, the inadequacy of the care from long-term care insurance requires that the caregivers work parttime, take on a second shift (or a third, if they have their own family), negotiate responsibilities and arrangements with other family members, or find the financial resources to purchase additional help. If they lack family or financial resources, or if the pension of the person in need of care is too low, they are at risk of becoming overburdened to the point of having to leave their job – a risk that affects low-income women in particular. Another risk is that the person in need of care will not receive all the care he or she needs – a risk that affects the low-income parents with care needs of low-income children. The availability of a support network – partners, relatives, even colleagues at work – seems to be a crucial factor in the work/care/life balance of the caregivers we interviewed, especially for the single mothers. But family support may not be enough to ensure an adequate balance. Access to non-family services and the financial means to be able to buy adequate care reduce not only the demand on family caregivers’ time but also the stress linked to having to juggle different demands. Some control over one’s own working time in terms of both predictability and flexibility is also important. In contrast, long working hours, unpredictable working hours, and the inability to adapt them to one’s own needs are among the main reasons for work/care tensions. This holds true for mothers and for children caring for an elderly parent as well as for caregivers in higher-level and those in lower-level jobs. The latter, however, have less control over their working conditions and gain fewer advan-

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tages from them, yet at the same time have fewer alternatives open to them. Our findings also show that reducing working time is not always possible and that it can entail very high financial and career-related costs. From this perspective, it is important to point out that even formal social rights concerning working time, such as parental or care leave and reducing the number of working hours, are perceived by many of the caregivers interviewed as rights that cannot be claimed if one wishes to avoid being marginalised or even laid off. Depending on the contract and the professional position, the perceived risks differ, but they are always present. This applies both for mothers and for caregivers of an elderly parent. In conclusion, social care policies play an important, albeit not exclusive, role in the strategies that caregivers implement and in the kind of tensions and risks they experience in carrying out their care responsibilities (Saraceno 2010; Sarasa 2008; Theobald 2005). In the interplay with working conditions, they also play a role in crystallising, if not strengthening, social inequalities, not only between men and women but also among women.

Notes 1.

2.

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3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

Christina Klenner and Sabine Neukirch were responsible for the research on parents and childcare, and Wolfgang Keck and Chiara Saraceno for the research on the caregivers of frail elderly parents. In 2008, the right to a childcare place for every child from the age of one year was established by law; this will come into effect in 2013. In addition, in 2007 the reform of parental leave strengthened the incentives for fathers to take part in it. ‘Female Managers of Everyday Life’ was coordinated by Ute Klammer, ‘Working Time – Family Time’ was coordinated by Christina Klenner, and ‘Flexible Female Breadwinners’ was headed by Christina Klenner and Ute Klammer. We used the European Socio-economic Classification (cf. Müller et al. 2006) but distinguished only two groups on account of the limited sample size. Most childminders often do not earn enough to make a living and are not fully covered by social security (Keimeleder 2003). In Germany, there are three different levels of dependency ranging from level 1 (the lowest) to level 3 (the highest). There are several hundred companies certified as ‘family friendly’ (‘Audit Beruf und Familie’: see http://www.beruf-und-familie.de).

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Bianchi, S.M. and Milkie, M. (2010),’Work and family research in the first decade of the 21st century’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 72 (3): 705-725. Blossfeld, H.-P. (2003),’Globalization, Social Inequality and the Role of Countryspecific Institutions’, in P. Conceicao, M.V. Heitor, and B.-A. Lundvall (eds.), Innovation, Competence Building and Social Cohesion in Europe, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar: 303-324. BmFSFJ (2006), Familie zwischen Flexibilität und Verlässlichkeit: Perspektiven für eine lebenslaufbezogene Familienpolitik. Siebter Familienbericht. Berlin. BmFSFJ (2008), Herausforderung familienbewusste Personalpolitik: Vorteile für Beschäftigte und Unternehmen. Monitor Familienforschung, no. 16. Berlin. BmFSFJ (2010), Das Wohlbefinden von Eltern: Auszüge aus dem Ravensburger Elternsurvey. Berlin. Breen, R. (1997), ‘Risk, recommodification and stratification’, Sociology, 31 (3): 473-489. Brehmer, W., Klenner, C. and Klammer, U. (2010), ‘Wenn Frauen das Geld verdienen – eine empirische Annäherung an das Phänomen der ‘Familienernährerin’, WSI-Diskussionspapier, no. 170, Düsseldorf. Carmichael, F. and Charles, S. (1998), ‘The labour market costs of community care’, Journal of Health Economics, 17 (6): 747-765. Cha, Y. (2010), ‘Reinforcing separate spheres: The impact of spousal overwork on men and women in dual earner households’, American Journal of Sociology, 75 (2): 303-329. Crompton, R., (2006), ‘Caring and working’, in R. Crompton (ed.), Employment and the Family: The Reconfiguration of Work and Family Life in Contemporary Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 31-61. Dallinger, U. and Theobald, H. (2008), ‘Pflege und Ungleichheit: Ungleiche Citizenship rights im internationalen Vergleich’, in U. Bauer and A. Büscher (eds.), Soziale Ungleichheit und Pflege, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag: 78-103. Esch, K., Klaudy, E.K. and Stöbe-Blossey, S. (2005), Bedarfsorientierte Kinderbetreuung: Gestaltungsfelder für die Kinder- und Jugendpolitik. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Fuller, S. (2009), ‘Investigating longitudinal dimensions of precarious employment – conceptual and practical issues’, in L. Vosko, M. MacDonald, and I. Campbell (eds.), Gender and the Contours of Precarious Employment, London: Routledge: 226-239. Gallie, D. and Russell, H. (2009), ‘Work-family conflict and working conditions in Western Europe’, Social Indicators Research, 93 (3): 445-467. Giullari, S. and Lewis, J. (2005), ‘The adult worker model family, gender equality and care: The search for new policy principles and the possibilities and problems of a capabilities approach’, Economy and Society, 34 (1): 76-104. Greve, B. (2009), ‘Can choice in welfare states be equitable?’, Social Policy & Administration, 43 (6): 543-556. Hahn, K. (2005), ‘Kindertagespflege und Kindertageseinrichtungen gemeinsam denken’, Theorie und Praxis der Sozialpädagogik, 7: 41-44. Henz, U. (2006), ‘Informal caregiving at working age: Effects of job characteristics and family configurations’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 68: 411429. Hochschild, A.R. (1997), The Time Bind. When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, New York: Henry Holt & Company.

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Jüttner, A.-K., Leitner, S., and Rüling, A. (2009), ‘Increasing returns: The new economy of family policy in Britain and Germany’, Paper presented at the final conference of the AGF Programme Sustainable Growth, Sustainable Welfare: Towards a New Settlement in Germany and the United Kingdom, held 2-3 April 2009 in Edinburgh. Jurczyk, K., Schier, M., Szymenderski, P., Lange, A., and Voß, G. (2009), Entgrenzte Arbeit – entgrenzte Familie: Grenzmanagement im Alltag als neue Herausforderung, Berlin. Keck, W. and Saraceno, C. (2010), ‘Caring for a parent while working for pay in the German welfare regime’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 5 (1): 107-138. Keimeleder, L. (2003), ‘Was ist ‘qualifizierte’ Kindertagespflege?’, Paper presented at the conference Auf- und Ausbau einer qualifizierten Kindertagespflege, held 16 October 2003 in Frankfurt. Klammer, U. and Letablier, M.-T. (2007), ‘Family policies in Germany and France: The role of enterprises and social partners’, Social Policy and Administration, 41 (6): 672-692. Klein, K.J., Berman, L.M. and Dickson, M.W. (2000), ‘May I work part-time? An exploration of predicted employer responses to employee request for parttime work’, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 57 (1): 85-101. Klenner, C. (2005), ‘Gleichstellung von Frauen und Männern und Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf: Eine Analyse von tariflichen Regelungen’, in WSITarifhandbuch, ed. Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut, HansBöckler-Stiftung: 41-65. Klenner, C. (2008), ‘Gleichstellung und familienfreundliche Arbeitsbedingungen’, WSI-Mitteilungen, 6: 342-345. Koch, A. (2008), ‘Elternzeit – Teilzeit – Aus(zeit)? Teilzeitrechte in Führungspositionen’, WSI-Mitteilungen, 11/12: 612-625. Kohaut, S. and Möller, I. (2009), ‘Vereinbarungen zur Chancengleichheit: Kaum Fortschritte bei der betrieblichen Förderung’, IAB-Kurzbericht no. 26/ 2009, Nuremberg. Korpi, W. (2000), ‘Faces of inequality: Gender, class and patterns of inequality in different types of welfare states’, Social Politics, 7: 127-191. Kreyenfeld, M. and Krapf, S. (2010), ‘Soziale Ungleichheit und Kinderbetreuung – Eine Analyse der sozialen und ökonomischen Determinanten der Nutzung von Kinderbetreuungseinrichtungen’, in Becker, R./Lauterbach, W. (Hrsg.): Bildung als Privileg. Erklärungen und Befunde zu den Ursachen der Bildungsungleichheit. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag: 107-128. Ludwig, I., Schlevogt, V., Klammer, U. and Gerhard, U. (2002), Managerinnen des Alltags: Strategien erwerbstätiger Mütter in Ost- und Westdeutschland, Berlin: Sigma. Müller, W., Wirth, H., Bauer, G., Pollak, R., and Weiss, F. (2006), ‘ESeC – Kurzbericht zur Validierung und Operationalisierung einer europäischen sozioökonomischen Klassifikation’, ZUMA-Nachrichten, 30 (59): 111-119. Rübenach, S.P. and Keller, M. (2011), ‘Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf: Ergebnisse des Mikrozensus 2009’, Wirtschaft und Statistik, April, Wiesbaden: Statistisches Bundesamt: 329-347. Sachverständigenkommission (2011), Neue Wege – Gleiche Chancen. Gleichstellung von Frauen und Männern im Lebensverlauf. Gutachten der Sachverständi-

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genkommission an das BMFSFJ für den 1. Gleichstellungsbericht der Bundesregierung. Saraceno, C. (2010), ‘Social inequalities in facing old age dependency: A bigenerational perspective’, Journal of European Social Policy, 20 (1): 1-13. Saraceno, C. (2011), ‘Childcare needs and childcare policies: A multidimensional issue’, Current Sociology, 59 (1): 78-96. Sarasa, S. (2008), ‘Do welfare benefits affect women’s choices of adult caregiving?’, European Sociological Review, 24 (1): 37-51. Statistisches Bundesamt (2004), ‘Alltag in Deutschland: Analysen zur Zeitverwendung’, Forum der Bundesstatistik, 43. Theobald, H. (2005), ‘Social exclusion and care for the elderly: Theoretical concepts and changing realities in European welfare states.’ WZB Discussion Paper SP I 2005-301. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung Berlin. Witzel, A. (2000), ‘Das problemzentrierte Interview’, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, No. 1, Art. 22.

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5 Working caregivers ‘living under pressure’ in France Blanche Le Bihan, Claude Martin and Arnaud Campéon

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1

Introduction

The debate in France on the balance between family and professional life is developing in a relatively paradoxical context. With one of the highest fertility rates in Europe (two children per woman in 2010, 2011 and 2012) and with nearly 60 per cent of women between the ages of 15 and 64 working (for the most part full-time), childcare services and nursery schools offer a wide range of care solutions. Nonetheless, stress levels among parents remain high, especially in comparison with other European countries, as shown by Crompton in 2006. In the light of these results, what Crompton calls work-life conflicts identified in households or stress related to the work-life balance are as significant in France as they are in the UK; although at a lower level than in the United States or even Portugal, it is still noticeably higher than in Norway or Finland (Crompton 2006: 132). Analysts have pointed out different factors that might explain the difficulty French couples experience in reconciling family and working life. Crompton insists on the very unequal division of domestic and care tasks between genders, which she defines as ‘gender traditionalism’ (Crompton 2006: 32). Périvier argues a similar point when she describes the ‘status quo of inequality’ in France (Périvier 2007; RegnierLoilier 2009; Maruani 2011), which has been confirmed by the recent national survey of family and intergenerational relations (ERFI Survey by INED). Another factor can be put forward as an explanation of the tensions between care and work in French households: the situation in the labour market and its deterioration in recent decades. As Concialdi has pointed out, temporary and part-time employment has been increasing significantly – in total, the number of precarious jobs increased by 2.5 million between 1983 and 2005, with this increase accounting for more than 60 per cent of the total growth of paid employment (Concialdi 2006: 20). According to the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (L’Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques or INSEE), the status of 13 per cent of paid workers is precarious, including those in fixed-term contracts from the public and private sectors, temporary jobs and publicly subsidised employment (contrats aidés) (2007). The type of working hours is also an important aspect of the 101

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labour market deterioration. Although 37 per cent of workers in France have ‘standard’ hours, at least two out of three employees have ‘atypical’ schedules (DARES 2009): 19 per cent have regular working hours at night or during weekends, and ten per cent work irregular hours as the need arises, particularly in the business and public sectors. Seven per cent of employees have variable working hours and 10 per cent have long working hours (executives and intermediate occupations). Lastly, 17.5 per cent of workers, most of whom are women, have part-time jobs. This increase in women’s labour market participation, together with the deterioration of working conditions and increased life expectancy, also serves to raise this issue of conciliation in relation to the care of old people. More and more adult children are faced with the responsibility of caring for an elderly parent while still working and even while having other caring responsibilities. This trend is confirmed by statistics on informal caregivers. According to a French national survey (Petite & Weber 2006), 56 per cent of informal caregivers are offspring and 11 per cent are partners of offspring; of these caregivers, 62 per cent are women. Moreover, 41 per cent of informal caregivers also hold down a job. Among these ‘working caregivers’, 64 per cent are offspring and 20 per cent are partners of offspring. Unlike with childcare, the policy context does not facilitate conciliation because public support for the care of old people remains limited, despite the development of a specific care policy in relation to old people based on the priority given to home-based care and on the introduction (in the late 1990s) of a cash allowance aimed at facilitating the purchase of caring activities in the private professional care market. This chapter focuses on the daily pressures experienced by a sample of working caregivers. The sample comprises 21 parents (15 couples where both partners work and six single mothers, all with young children) and 17 senior employees (four men and 12 women aged 42 to 65) with at least one elderly parent in need of care. Although the sample includes people of different generations, at different stages in life and with different caring responsibilities, they present similar experiences of pressure, which can lead to a very stressful life. Our analysis focuses on this convergence towards pressure of the two types of working caregivers. Our initial definition of pressure refers to the difficulties that families face when juggling work and care responsibilities. It is related to working conditions (working hours, employment stability), family structure (two-parent or single-parent household; number of siblings in the case of those caring for elderly parents) and caring responsibilities (young children under 12 years of age or elderly parents in need of care). Analysing the tensions emerging between care and work, which contribute to the pressure, and considering the various levels of pressure described by the working caregivers interviewed, the analysis makes a distinction between the level of constraints and the feeling of pressure.

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We argue that it is possible to identify a series of potential constraints related to family configuration, working conditions or the social situation of the working caregivers that contribute to everyday stress levels. Yet simple causalities are not enough to explain the level of pressure experienced by working caregivers. Constraints do explain part of the difficulties working caregivers are confronted with, but one must also consider the way people feel or their self-representation of the various constraints. This analysis adopts the perspective of American researchers (Mattingly & Bianchi 2003; Sayer 2005; Mattingly & Sayer 2006) who distinguish between ‘objective factors of pressure’ (lack of free time, for instance) and the feeling – the subjective impression – of being overwhelmed, which we define as the feeling of pressure. Obviously, many factors come into play in regulating and diminishing the difficulties of combining work and care responsibilities: the level of income people may have, which may or may not allow one to resort to paid-for services; relational resources within the family or social network; and the public care provision available. But beyond these potential constraints or support, understanding the everyday stress experienced by working caregivers means taking into account a range of subjective variables, in particular the representations that parents and adult children have of their own roles and their satisfaction or dissatisfaction at work. Our analysis of the situations of our 38 working caregivers shows that a high level of potential constraints does not systematically mean a very high level of pressure. Working caregivers do not have the same experiences of care, and everyday pressure – which is linked to objective factors – varies from one situation to another according to the feeling of pressure. The first section below sets out the policy context and shows the limited public support in both configurations studied; the second section questions the situations of the working caregivers interviewed and the care arrangements set up. In the final two sections of this chapter, we discuss the potential constraints and the feeling of pressure experienced by the working caregivers. We explain how working caregivers with limited constraints feel overwhelmed, or conversely, how working caregivers with an accumulation of constraints manage to contain pressure.

2 The policy context: Public support remains limited To appreciate the everyday pressure experienced by ‘working caregivers’ – parents with young children who both work and have non-standard working hours as well as adult children with a job who have caring responsibilities towards an elderly parent – it is important to keep the policy context in mind. Indeed, to facilitate a balance between work and family, public support should develop in two main directions: providing time for workers to work, and providing time for caregivers to care. In working carers ‘living under pressure’ in france

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the two sectors studied, these needs can be met by different types of policy measures such as services, cash payments, care leave and adjustments to working hours. In France, the situation is characterised by a recent long-term care policy based on a cash allowance and on traditionally strong intervention in the field of childcare, though with marginal attention given to the needs of parents working non-standard hours. Turning to conciliation policy measures, in both sectors, public support falls short of meeting the needs of families. France does not have a uniform policy for care of old people. Divided between health and social care, home and residential care, public and private providers, it cuts across different policy sectors and refers to different rationales in terms of both funding and policy measures. However, during the last decade, priority is given to home-based care – which had already been presented as the best solution for meeting the care needs of old people as early as 1962, and has been regularly confirmed as such since then. Yet the home-based services sector is, as in other European countries (Burau et al. 2007), also fragmented, concerning as it does both social and medical sectors, which in France are covered by two distinct systems. Medical services are financed by health insurance and have played an important role in home care since 1981, with the development of ‘home nursing services’. Home nursing services are mainly provided by non-profit organisations and in 2008, the 2,095 Services de soins infirmiers à domicile (home nursing services) provided 106,000 places, corresponding to 20 places per 1,000 people aged 75 and over (Bertrand 2010). Social care services have also developed, providing domestic and personal care to old people at home. Their cost is assumed by care users, who receive public support through the allocation of a specific benefit, the Allocation personnalisée d’autonomie (‘personalised allowance for autonomy’) created at the end of the 1990s and constituting a major component of the French care policy for old people (Le Bihan & Martin 2010). Closely linked to employment policy, with the objective of supporting new jobs in the services sector, the implementation of this cash payment has entailed the development of professional home-based services. In 2008, a survey (Marquier 2010) estimated that there were 710,000 care workers caring for old people in need of care, and for 515,000 of these people, this was their sole employment. Despite the significant increase in the number of care workers, the offer of services, which is characterised by significant territorial disparities, is insufficient to cover the needs of old people. In contrast, in the field of childcare, France has a strong tradition of intervention (Martin & Le Bihan 2006). Since the 1970s, many collective childcare institutions (‘crèches’ for children under three years of age and childcare centres on Wednesdays) have been encouraged to develop, and in the 1980s, qualified childminders were introduced for children under the age of three, the cost of which is supported by specific cash benefits. Parental leave was also introduced in the mid-1980s. Pre-school also

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plays a crucial role, as children can attend it from the age of three (and even two in some regions), from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m., with the possibility of resorting to after-school facilities up until 6 or 6.30 p.m. Though the childcare system offers a wide range of solutions for parents of young children, the situation is quite different when it comes to parents working non-standard hours. Non-standard working hours group together a wide range of professional situations – long working days, fragmented timetables, night and weekend work and shift work – all with one feature in common: they fail to correspond to the opening times of childcare services, which usually cover daytime from 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., and only from Monday to Friday. Providing time for caregivers is a second aspect of public support. As stated by Haynes et al., ‘an additional key challenge for policy makers is the importance of understanding the relationship between labour market participation and enabling caring activity, and how caring relationships can be better sustained by providing paid rights for career breaks to undertake caring’ (2010: 81). Financial support, by way of cash transfers, for relatives who take care for elderly people is therefore another answer to the care needs of elderly people. In France spouses are excluded from such transfers. Our qualitative research, which has focused on the specific situation of family caregivers who have a job, also shows the importance of regulating working hours. In France, the possibility of working part-time exists and is often used by mothers of young children. But it is not a common solution adopted by adult children caring for elderly parents, since only 11 per cent of working caregivers resort to this type of solution (Le Bihan & Martin 2006b). The introduction in 1998 of legislation concerning the ‘reduction of working time’ (Réduction du temps de travail, or RTT) has also facilitated the work/life balance for parents of young children as well as that of adult children caring for an elderly parent by reducing the number of hours worked per week from 39 to 35, or by allocating specific RTT days off to workers. Quantitative and qualitative research has shown that caregivers often resort to this solution to take a day off to take a parent to the doctor, to deal with administrative questions or to care for their children. The existence of parental leave, introduced in the mid-1980s, is another solution for parents of young children. It must be underlined, however, that the allowance allocated to the parent who decides to stop working is a low flat-rate amount corresponding to a maximum of 533 euros per month and is therefore mostly used by lower social classes (Méda & Périvier 2007; Milewski & Périvier 2011). In terms of elderly care, recent possibilities for leave have been introduced, although these are not yet very well-developed. They include ‘unpaid familial solidarity leave’ to accompany a dying relative for three months, which is renewable once, and short-term paid leave to care for a dying relative, created in 2009, corresponding to 47 euros per day and paid for three weeks only. working carers ‘living under pressure’ in france

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As can be seen, public support for social care in France is characterised by the diversification of solutions, with the introduction of various types of policy measures – services, cash payments, care leave, and adjustments to working hours – which remain inadequate for meeting the needs of families faced with a range of care and work responsibilities. It goes without saying that, although the parenting role cannot be compared with that of an adult child caring for an elderly parent, our analysis focuses on the common characteristics of these working caregivers, all of whom invest in the organisation of mixed care arrangements.

3 Being a working caregiver in a mixed-care arrangements context

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It’s not that easy being, at one and the same time, a good daughter to your parents, a good mother to your children, and a good manager to your employees … and, I should add, a good partner to your husband!

These are the words of Suzanne, a 51-year-old manager of a firm employing 20 people, a mother of a nine-year-old daughter and the daughter of two elderly parents who are still living at home but whose care needs are increasing. Suzanne’s words illustrate the multiplicity of possible care responsibilities, which can appear all the more difficult to juggle when combined with working obligations. In this quotation, Suzanne sums up the feelings expressed by the various caregivers interviewed, all of whom – parents of young children as well as adult children of elderly parents – expressed the difficulty of thinking about several things at the same time. In relation to both childcare and caring for old people, the notion of ‘mental burden’ describes the situations that caregivers outline. Though professional care – cleaners, personal assistants or childcare centres – is a component of all care arrangements set up by the 17 adult children of elderly parents in our sample, in most cases, it represents only 5 to 10 hours a week, plus a daily visit by a ‘nursing assistant’ who is in charge of medical care. But these professional interventions seldom cover the needs of elderly parents, and family caregivers have a major role to play, at different levels of the organisation of care. Performing direct care tasks is just one dimension of the caregiver’s role. Many of the working caregivers that we interviewed, particularly those who did not live near the parents who were being cared for, are not directly involved in concrete caring tasks. The diversification of care resources brought about by the new possibilities offered by cash payments has also reinforced the need to organise and monitor the care arrangements. The contribution made by paid caregivers, professional or otherwise, does not mean that there is no informal unpaid care provision, but

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rather that the forms of care have evolved: the most onerous everyday care tasks may be delegated to professionals, but the family caregiver is still present, dealing with administrative problems and the organisation of care arrangements (Da Roit & Le Bihan 2011). All the interviewees in our sample are the main contact person for the professional workers caring for their elderly parents. It is they who contact services or workers and who carry out the various – sometimes complex – administrative procedures required. Once the paid care worker has been recruited and the arrangement set up, it is also the family caregivers who ensure that the care arrangement operates smoothly on a day-to-day basis, who replace the paid worker when problems arise, and who provide follow-up, making medical appointments and accompanying their elderly parents to them. They are the links between the various elements of the care arrangement, as well as being its ‘managers’. This co-ordination role also involves managing a set of relationships within the caregiver’s own family, with parents and siblings. Elderly people often need some convincing before they will accept the delegation of some caring tasks to external caregivers. Edith (age 55) provides a good illustration of this very demanding ‘care management role’. Living 120 kilometres away from her mother and working as a manager in a public service, she had great difficulties in setting up satisfactory care arrangements. After the death of her father, she spent a great deal of time organising her mother’s support, resorting to a range of services: home care, a nursing assistant and also meal delivery. Her depressive mother had refused any professional care, and Edith never knew what would happen in the course of the day – when her mother would phone her, or even whether the home care workers and nurses had been able to visit her. She spent a great deal of time performing this role of co-ordinator, particularly on Wednesdays, which was her day off: It leaves you fragile, and you’re more fragile because it eats up your work time … I saw [the first numbers of her mother’s telephone number] on my mobile: I said to myself, ‘Here we go again!’ It had been like that since November, many times a day! It was like being hounded … I said to myself, ‘Thank God I have my Wednesdays!’ Because in an emergency, I called the doctor, I called the nurse from my mobile at the office, and on Wednesdays I had time to talk calmly, to prepare for a visit from the health or social worker, and also to talk to my mother and convince her … it wasn’t great! So on Wednesdays, I spent a lot of time on the phone, filling out paperwork, I spent my Wednesdays doing all that …

Guy, a 51-year-old married technical assistant, confirms this psychological weight of being committed as the caregiver of a parent. Both of his parents live nearby, and he has set up a complete arrangement with pub-

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lic home care workers and paid caregivers every day of the week. Yet the mental burden remains: In my daily organisation, in my timetable, I have to take my parents into account. I have to think ‘my parents’. Yes, that’s it, I have to think ‘my parents’, even if in some situations it can be a bit of a constraint. It’s like I told you earlier, you always have to bear that in mind. It’s part of my timetable, it’s fixed in there, just like work, like … you see, it has become completely natural.

This mental burden can be a permanent source of stress. Fabienne, a 48year-old psychologist, notes: It’s something that’s in my head all the time, yes, yes … I think about it every day: is there a nurse who’s going to call, or is something going to happen, yes, absolutely! Yes, that really, really stresses me out!

On the childcare side, the focus on non-standard working hours and the lack of childcare services at these times of the day or week are an element of pressure. Just as in caring for elderly people, the 21 couples or single parents interviewed are involved in different forms of care ranging from direct care – which is a major part of the caring role of parents towards children – to organising the best care arrangements for both children and parents.

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Christine: Throughout the day, even when I work I think of her [her threeyear-old daughter] … particularly in the afternoon as I have to leave work before 6 to pick her up from the childminder’s house. (age 34, shop owner) Natacha: I have to think about organisation all the time … my schedule changes a lot and I always have to ask myself ‘Oh, what day are we? … Oh, ok, today is Tuesday so I don’t have to rush after work … Gabriel [the father] will bring the girls home’ … (age 33, employed as a hairdresser)

In our sample, childcare arrangements involved a combination of various resources to organise childcare when parents are working. Traditional childcare services or pre-schools are a main resource during the daytime, and a great variety of informal, formal or semi-formal care resources are used early in the morning, late in the evening or during weekends. This can take the form of semi-formal care, such as babysitters, who pick the child up from school or crèche and care for him or her at home until one of the parents comes back, but most of the time it is also informal family care. The resort to shift parenting is a frequent solution among our 21 families, and grandparents are also included if they live nearby. Friends, neighbours and parents of children’s friends can also be called upon for help when needed.

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Lucie, a 37-year-old university lecturer, and Nicolas, a 38-year-old assistant film director, would not be able to manage the care of their son Antoine, aged 18 months, without babysitters and grandparents. Antoine goes to the crèche during the day, but Lucie is sometimes absent several days in a row because the university where she works is 500 kilometres away. Her weekly timetable is fixed but also includes a certain level of uncertainty depending on meetings she has to attend. Nicolas’ profession often forces him to be absent for several months at a time. And when he works in Paris, where they live, he starts very early in the morning and finishes late at night. The crèche is therefore not sufficient to provide care for Antoine. Lucie regularly asks her mother, father or mother-in-law to care for him. A babysitter has also been recruited to support the two parents. Framing the general context in which families live, policy measures are an initial main variable in defining the work-care balance of working caregivers. Limited public services have a direct impact on the type of care arrangements, which can be defined as real ‘patchworks’ combining various care providers in line with the availability of the main family caregivers. But other potential constraints can also be identified, the combination of which results in a certain level of constraints.

4 A series of potential constraints creating pressure Apart from government policies related to care, there are other issues that come into play when setting up care arrangements. These issues determine what can be referred to as the level of constraint, which in turn may (or may not) dictate the feeling of pressure experienced by caregivers. Here we identify some of these issues.

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4.1 Working conditions The working hours and conditions of the working caregiver are of importance. In our samples, we have selected people from the public sector as well as from the private sector, managers as well as employees, so as to have a variety of working situations. We have identified two main elements as major sources of pressure for parents who have young children and for adult children caring for a relative with care needs: the impossibility of negotiating your own schedule and the difficulty of anticipating it. In our childcare sample, we have chosen to cover a wide range of situations that include very long working days, working on weekends, working in the early morning and late evening, and shift working. The working hours, which are all non-standard, can be classified as being regular or irregular and variable or invariable.

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Our qualitative interviews confirm quantitative analyses that have shown that the more atypical working hours are, the more employees find it difficult to reconcile family and professional life (Garner et al. 2004). As shown by Garner et al., this is the case for 80 per cent of mothers whose working hours alternate (in comparison with 40 per cent of fathers) and 72 per cent of mothers (68 per cent of fathers) working nights more than once a week; 67 per cent of mothers (64 per cent of fathers) working on Sundays; and 62 per cent of mothers (60 per cent of fathers) working before 7 a.m. or after 8 p.m. These working hours make care arrangements very complex to organise, and they can also have direct effects on the health and well-being of caregivers. Many of the parents we met commented on their exhaustion and present typical symptoms of stress, such as perpetual tenseness, headaches, muscle pains and significant sleep problems. For those who care for old people, our focus was not on non-standard working hours; indeed, most of our interviewees have standard working hours. But just as for the parents in the childcare sample, flexibility at work seems very important in enabling working caregivers to fulfil their caring responsibilities. For full-time workers, it is not always easy to find the time needed to handle unexpected circumstances or emergencies, to take an elderly parent to the doctor or hospital or even to deal with administrative matters. Edith, a 55-year-old training manager at a public services college, explains:

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I think that yes, for short periods, when you have got yourself organised, or to give support to your parents, it would be a good thing to take a few days off, to take the time needed to sort out problems … but it’s not always possible with work obligations.

Flexibility can be obtained by informally negotiating with one’s employer or colleagues or using the formal RTT system to take a day off. Gwenn and her husband are both teachers, and they have organised their schedules with their respective employers so that one of them is always with Gwenn’s mother, who lives with them and needs to be watched over. Having an understanding employer can therefore facilitate the carework balance. The instability of care arrangements is another potential constraint that can contribute to the daily pressure experienced by working caregivers. Pressure can be increased when as a caregiver you cannot rely on the resources you have mobilised or when the situation of the person being cared for is forever evolving, meaning that care arrangements have to be constantly adjusted. In relation to the care of elderly people, this instability is linked to the unpredictability of the situation of the person being cared for. Such situations are made all the more difficult to cope with by the fact that it is hard to precisely anticipate the care needs of old people. A broken hip can completely disrupt a care arrangement that has been

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set up. The accumulation of illnesses, increasing levels of disability, the necessity of being watched over and the need to adapt accommodation – these are the sorts of problems elderly people have to live with and which contribute to the unpredictable everyday difficulties faced by family caregivers. Concerning childcare, this instability is linked to the specific configuration caused by non-standard working hours. The degree of unpredictability of the parents’ timetable is significant in contributing to the instability of care arrangements. It is indeed very difficult to organise a care arrangement when you do not know what your working hours for the coming month will be. Béatrice, who is a bus driver, and Patrick, a train driver, have schedules that are both variable and very irregular, and both are given new schedules every four or six weeks. This inevitably makes the care arrangement complex, as it must rely on a great diversity of resources and is at risk of substantial instability. Resources for support are also decisive in helping families to find care solutions adapted to their needs. For parents of young children, it provides the option of recruiting a babysitter to look after their children when they are at work in the evenings or early in the mornings. In the case of adult children caring for elderly parents, it might take the form of a personal assistant to care for their mother at home. Family configuration also comes into play. Clearly, a lone parent will have different childcare burdens from a dual-parent household; the same holds for an only child caring for an elderly parent compared with adult siblings that can take turns caring for their parents. More generally, relational and family resources are important and can facilitate this work-care balance. With regard to the care of old people, three other objective factors can be added: 1) the level of dependency of the elderly parent being cared for, 2) the geographical distance between the caregiver and the person being cared for, and 3) the family status of the person being cared for (widowed, living apart from spouse, etc.). In relation to childcare, one could add the age of the children, since the needs of a very young child, which stretch across the whole day, are not the same as those of a child who goes to school. Taking all of these factors into consideration, we identified for each situation a certain level of constraint that corresponds to a specific combination of different variables. We then set out to discover whether it was possible to deduce simple relationships between the level of constraints and the difficulties in balancing family and professional life.

4.2 The accumulation of constraints: A source of pressure The accumulation of constraints is the first element contributing to the level of pressure, as illustrated by our analysis of those caring for elderly parents. working carers ‘living under pressure’ in france

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Considering this combination of constraints, the French sample of those caring for elderly parents can be summarised as follows (Table 5.1):

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• • • •

• • • • •

• •

• •

• • •

•

•

Instability

• • •

• •

•

•

•

•

• • • •

•

• •

•

•

• • • • • •

• •

• • •

•

•

• • • •

• •

•

• • • • • • • • •

•

•

Total

Weak social network

• • • • •

• •

Low offer of services

•

•

• • • • •

•

Old parent alone

Geographical distance

Difficult work conditions • •

Other care responsibilities

• • • • • •

Family status of the carer

•

Cohabitation

Roger Caroline Guy Jean Alice Fabienne Joséphine Gwenn Edith Daniel Pascale Josiane Françoise Mireille Amélie Yvette Renée

High level of dependency

Low level of income

Table 5.1 Accumulation of constraints in the elderly care sample

5 9 3 6 7 5 8 4 7 5 7 6 3 5 6 3 2

Guy has a low level of constraints. He is 51 years old, married and has two adult children. As a technical assistant, he has regular working hours from Monday to Friday. He also has major responsibilities as the town’s chief fire-fighter and dedicates his Thursdays to this role. His wife, aged 49, is a medical secretary. Until recently, Guy only cared for his 81-year-old father, whose mobility and autonomy had greatly diminished since the onset of his hemiplegia. His mother was still in good health and able to care for her husband. The situation changed in October 2007, when his mother had a stroke and had to be hospitalised. She was still hospitalised at the time of the interview. Guy set up a complete formal care arrangement, paid for partly by the cash allowance and partly by his parents: a home care worker visits six days a week at lunchtime and in the evening to carry out domestic tasks; a nursing service comes each morning seven days a week to help his father get up, wash and dress. Despite this organisation, Guy spends a lot of time with his father: he visits him nearly every day for a friendly chat or to take him his bread.

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His Thursdays are often devoted to his father, taking him to the doctor or for medical tests. Guy’s brother helps him with care tasks; for example, he takes his father to his house during weekends and visits him once a week. The care arrangement combines both formal and informal resources and offers a stable level of organisation. Conversely, Caroline has a high level of constraints. She is 51, married and has two children; her 16-year-old daughter still lives at home. As a teacher in a technical college, Caroline has regular hours of work and a timetable that leaves her free time to prepare her lessons at home (she does not teach on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings nor on Thursday afternoons). Her mother, who has been living with her daughter since her stroke in 2005, is highly dependent. She has difficulties moving and talking, she is incontinent, and has to be helped to get up, wash and dress. As an only child, Caroline ‘naturally’ found herself the main caregiver after her mother’s stroke. The care arrangement is mainly informal, and few professionals intervene: a nurse comes every morning and a home care workers visits for two hours twice a week to help with the housework. Caroline lives in a rural area, and the level of services available is quite low. Caroline has been looking after her mother on a daily basis; she washes her laundry, prepares her meals, tidies her room, takes her for a walk, gets up in the night if she hears her shouting and even occasionally washes her and gives her medication. Caroline is with her mother whenever she is not at the college. Working at home is therefore very difficult, and work/family conflicts are frequent. Considering these two situations, pressure can be defined as the combination of different constraints. The greater the constraints, the more difficult the situation is for the caregiver. Yet although the accumulation of constraints makes working caregivers more vulnerable, it does not mean they will experience the same level of pressure. More subjective variables come into play, explaining what can be defined as the ‘feeling of pressure’, which is not related to the objective difficulties and constraints of the situation but rather to the way in which caregivers experience their situation.

5 From constraints to a ‘feeling of pressure’ Even with a low level of constraint, the situation can be difficult for caregivers to cope with when the quality of the care arrangement is at stake.

5.1 The quality of the care arrangement Satisfaction/dissatisfaction concerning the care arrangement is an initial element contributing to the feeling of pressure. Having a satisfactory care arrangement, even if it is based on several different formal and in-

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formal resources, will reduce pressure. This is true for childcare as well as for the care of old people. In the field of childcare, if grandparents live nearby, they are frequently asked to help out. They are often present when the children are sick or can even be a regular resource for looking after the children during the week when parents are working. In fact they are, in many cases, crucial to the care arrangement and the reconciliation of work and family life. Yet this solution is not always experienced in a satisfactory way and may appear as a solution only by default. Elise, a 31-year-old health visitor living alone with her son, asks her parents to collect Herman from school every week. This solution, although stable because the parents are available, is not the most suitable one. She would prefer to have a babysitter, but this is financially impossible. The recourse to grandparents is therefore a solution by default: I’ve got my rituals with him and then my dad has his own rituals with his grandson, he does something else, he does it in his way … My mother also does it in her own way. There are things that might disturb me, we can talk about it, but afterwards, I can’t both ask them to be there and then say to them ‘Well no, you shouldn’t do it like that’ … If they are looking after him, I’ve got to let them do it in their own way. (…)

In fact, getting grandparents to help is not always easy. A certain number of disagreements may emerge regarding child-raising styles, and the trust that is required to hand over the care of one’s child to a third party is not always present with grandparents.

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5.2 The relationship between siblings and between the caregiver and the dependant The quality of the care arrangement also relies on the type of relationship between siblings and between the caregiver and the person being cared for. The only-child situation is often difficult for caregivers, who find themselves facing the constraints of care alone. Joséphine, a 55year-old schoolteacher, is an only child and is therefore the only support for her elderly mother. Although there is no doubt that the presence of brothers and sisters can constitute an important resource for the main caregiver, this may also present a certain number of problems and in fact create more pressure. If the division of tasks is not straightforward or if there are different points of view among family members regarding the situation of the elderly parent, this may give rise to tensions and conflicts between siblings. This is the case for Fabienne, a 48-year-old occupational psychologist. Despite her medium level of constraints (Table 5.1), she experiences strong feelings of pressure which can be explained by her relationship

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with her brothers and sisters. She is one of six children, four of whom live near their parents. Fabienne’s mother is in a nursing home; her father, whose health is deteriorating, wants to stay at home and refuses to live in an institution or even, until recently, to be helped by socio-medical professionals. The decision was made to allow their father to live at home, to ask for help from professionals, and for everyone to take turns caring for him on the weekends. Because of their father’s state of health it is becoming an increasingly heavy responsibility to care for him over an entire weekend. Disagreements between brothers and sisters have therefore arisen: some consider the situation to be too unstable and would like their father to live in an institution, while others prioritise their father’s wish to remain at home, even if this involves risks for him in everyday life. The quality of care arrangements is not the only variable in the feeling of pressure. The latter is also related to the ideas the caregiver has about what constitutes a ‘good parent’ or a ‘good son or daughter’. These ‘ideals of care’ (Kremer 2007), based on cultural norms and representations, are decisive and can be major sources of pressure if the gap between the actual involvement of the caregiver and the conception they have of this role is too wide.

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5.3 Representation of one’s role as a caregiver The more importance accorded to one’s role as caregiver – the more parents (mother and/or father) consider that they must dedicate a great deal of time to their parental duties, or adult children to the care of their elderly parents – the more unavailability will be perceived as a fault or a deficiency and likely to cause pressure. As already mentioned, in France, public childcare services are well developed, at least during standard daytime hours. Parents of young children can resort to childminders or childcare centres and even to school from the time the child is two years old. Yet a certain number of parents in the childcare sample consider that group childcare – even the canteen at lunchtime – is not a satisfactory solution. They try as much as possible to avoid childcare facilities they consider to be tiring for the children and a source of stress. Camille, a 35-year-old social worker, and Matthieu, a 38-year-old workshop foreman, have young children. Camille: We thought our children shouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of our working hours. The girls had to stay after school at the homework club for a month or two, when their grandparents were on holiday. At those times, yes, we do need the homework club. But it remains very occasional. And when they do have to go there, they don’t have time to play, they don’t have time to relax, it is not very comfortable for them. So we decided that the children’s needs come first. We are always running around, but that’s our choice, and they can enjoy being calm at home after their school day.

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To avoid group childcare, Camille and Matthieu call on their parents or their niece, whom they employ as a babysitter. In their case, it is a positive choice and the best care solution for their children. As Camille puts it: These are people that I trust and who enjoy being with my children and vice versa …

In fact, for Camille, as for a certain number of parents in our sample, the objective is to spend more time with the children. There are, therefore, certain things in day-to-day life that are particularly important for her, such as coming home before her daughters are asleep and preserving quality family time. During the week, Camille and Matthieu often simply cross paths: when one comes home to look after the girls, the other goes out to work, following the shift parenting system. Weekends are devoted to family; Camille and Matthieu accept very few invitations:

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Saturday evenings, more and more often, we refuse to invite or be invited … we often keep that time for us. So, this makes our friends laugh but we have a diary for weekends four months in advance as well …

In terms of caring for elderly people, the question of defining what makes a good caregiver is also crucial. For many of the interviewees in our sample, caring for parents is presented as something ‘natural’ – ‘it goes without saying’, ‘because it’s my father or mother’. This kinship connection, considered sufficient in itself to explain the investment in the care arrangement, must be considered in the more general context of the relationship between the caregiver and the dependant in the family history. The ‘gift and debt’ caring relationship is, from this perspective, an explanation of the feeling of pressure (Le Bihan & Martin 2008). The caring daughter gives time and attention to her parents, just as they once gave their time and attention to her. The objective is not only to give back, but also to maintain the relationship. The investment in care arrangements can be explained by the adult children’s desire to make the end of their parents’ lives easier. Some working caregivers pointed to their parents’ difficult life stories in which they had made significant sacrifices so that their children could climb the social ladder. The story of Alice, a 44-year-old primary school teacher, best illustrates this type of configuration and the pressure as it relates to the representation of her own role as caregiver. Sometimes exhausted, not thinking twice about leaving her husband and children if something happens to her parents who live 150 kilometres away, Alice has made a real mission of her caregiving role. The difficulties encountered by her parents during their lives are the main argument she uses to explain her over-investment in the caring relationship. After seven years in prison during the Franco dictatorship in Spain, her father decided to leave the country with

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his wife and three children and to settle in France, where he became a farmer and her mother a housecleaner. My father had a very peculiar life. He went through a lot of ordeals … He needs to be loved; there is no other way. I imagine my father’s death a lot more dramatically than my mother’s, even though I love my mother just as much. But considering his relationship with death … I feel invested in that, because I don’t think it could be different …

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This role as a ‘repairer’ of her parent’s life (Attias-Donfut, Lapierre & Segalen 2002) is very constraining and explains the pressure she experiences in trying to meet her father’s needs, come what may. These ‘ideals of care’ raise the issue of norms and social obligations. What could be considered individual preferences (Hakim 2000) are in fact related to the specific history of the relationship between the caregiver and the dependant and refer to more general standards and values such as children’s – especially daughters’ – duty to their parents. Gender is an important variable to consider, as social norms and identities put greater pressure on women for all care-related activities (Lewis 1998; Ungerson 2005). Our analysis shows that daughters are significantly more involved in hands-on care of their parents than their brothers. In the interviews, we repeatedly found that it comes down to daughters to care for their parents. The caregiver’s mission that Alice has taken on can also be partially explained by a feeling of obligation arising out of her education and culture. She is aware of the tradition of her family values, which are part of a conservative culture and based on a certain conception of the family, defined as a source of solidarity and protection. Moreover, as the only girl in the family, she considers herself to be the only one truly capable of caring for her parents: I know my two brothers are there too and can participate in the care organisation … they do offer me support when needed … but it’s my duty anyway to care for my parents and make their lives easier … I was brought up like that in Spain: you don’t put your parents in a home. The grandparents live with their children, and the daughters, it’s their duty. I was brought up with that.

5.4 Representation of one’s role as a worker The caregiver’s relationship to work is another important variable contributing to feelings of pressure. While our sample of those caring for elderly parents does not include caregivers who have stopped working because of their care responsibilities1, what emerges clearly from the stories of the 17 working caregivers interviewed is their strong attachment to work. Not working is out of the question for the interviewees, and keeping one’s job is presented as a priority – both for the male and working carers ‘living under pressure’ in france

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female respondents. For some interviewees, employment is considered a necessity due to household income level or social family background. The ‘income effect’ identified by Carmichael and Charles (1998) is therefore confirmed. Josiane, a 49-year-old administrative employee in a nursing agency, explains that she needs to keep her job to support her family: Keep working is necessary, for the pay. And in any case, I like my job. I do it with satisfaction.

But this is not the only argument put forward. Josiane also underlines the satisfaction she finds at work (‘I like my job’). This is one of the main results of the qualitative analysis: for all interviewees, regardless of what their job is – teacher, restaurant owner, technician, employee or manager – and regardless of the phase in a person’s professional trajectory, their attachment to work is much more than a financial necessity: Josiane: Work’s my only breath of fresh air … I manage not to think. I have lots of work but it’s my lifeline. It’s my only link with the outside world anyway. Joséphine: I never took a day off! For my own morale it was better that I worked, it helped me. Work helps too! But it was a heavy load!

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This attachment to work is related to the caregiver’s self-fulfilment and social identity. It can even appear as a necessity in coping with care responsibilities and in protecting oneself against over-investing in the caregiving role. Francoise, a 53-year-old psychiatric nurse, and Daniel, a 48-year-old sports educator, explain: Françoise: My work is too important to me. It’s thanks to that that I’ve been able to maintain a bit of distance … I would never stop working … It’s been very important for my mental balance. I’d say that thanks to my work, I’ve been able to cope. At home it was not always easy; at my parents’ things were not always straightforward … at least at work I got some peace … I did what I had to do … It was my little oasis of calm … Daniel: I was happy to go to work because it helped me let off steam! My breath of fresh air … my work helped me! When I arrived in the morning, even if my worries were still there, at least I was in a different environment … My work is far too crucial to my personal balance to give it up; it really gives me space and time to breathe. I recharged my batteries at work so … it’s as I said before, outside I was on my own, but at work, at least I had the feeling of being surrounded by people and having a real network.

Both Daniel and Françoise refer to their ‘mental/personal balance’, illustrating what economists have identified as the ‘respite effect’ of work on care (Carmichael & Charles 1998; Fontaine 2009). Paid work represents

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a mechanism of balance that enables caregivers – who are sometimes very heavily involved in their care activities – to earn money, develop contacts and invest in something other than care, which in turn enables them to face their care responsibilities. The childcare analysis has confirmed the importance of work and the buffer effect it can produce, which has a positive impact on the caregiver’s work/life balance. What is at stake here is not the protection that work offers against overinvestment as a caregiver but the level of satisfaction/dissatisfaction at work. In their survey on the links between happiness and work, Christian Baudelot and Michel Gollac have shown the importance of work particularly for those people whose conditions are the most precarious or even those who do not have work: ‘it is people who work in categories with the most challenging working conditions, the lowest pay and the highest risk of unemployment for whom employment is one of the conditions of happiness’ (2006: 66). For the authors, appreciation of work is therefore all the more important because it is a rare commodity that is not acquired on a permanent basis. To explain this relationship to work, the authors go beyond the mechanical relationship between working conditions and degree of satisfaction by bringing into play a more subjective variable: social trajectory. When the identity given by work fails to correspond to personal or familial expectations, this may lead to dissatisfaction; but conversely, when the individual is employed in a profession that meets his/her own wishes, it is considered satisfactory. The issue is therefore one of ‘being in one’s rightful place’ in the social sphere, i.e. occupying a professional position that meets one’s aspirations and avoiding major divergences from these aspirations, which is a source of dissatisfaction. The position of many of the working caregivers in the childcare sample can be analysed in this way. Mathilde, a 45-year-old sound engineer and mother of two girls, is not satisfied with her professional life. In fact, she finds it increasingly difficult to tolerate the constraints imposed upon her by her status as a temporary worker in the entertainment industry. The resulting stress is therefore increasingly difficult to live with on a day-to-day basis, and pressure is felt in a very negative way. Mathilde’s professional activity, which she initially chose and which gave her much satisfaction, is no longer experienced in a positive manner. Now she sees only the constraints and negative consequences of the unpredictability of her time schedule: I get less and less advance notice. I get called on Thursday to work on Monday, and often not in the same city … I don’t know what I am going to do in a fortnight’s time, so it’s really week by week … and that’s exhausting! I’m fed up … It’s very difficult, very difficult to manage.

We find the same professional dissatisfaction in responses from Stéphanie, who works as a sales assistant in a superstore. Because she does not working carers ‘living under pressure’ in france

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feel valued in her job and because her wage is very low, she is thinking of not going back to work after the birth of her second child: I don’t know, I’ll have to have a look at the other supermarkets, if there are more perks, if the pay is a little bit better. Because having no perks and earning the minimum wage, I can’t see the point.

Conversely, Magali (aged 28), Lucie (aged 37) and Laure (aged 30), despite having very different professions – checkout assistant, university lecturer and nurse, respectively – emphasise the significance of their professional commitment in a similar way:

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Magali: For the moment, I’m targeting my professional career. Really, I want to progress a little professionally, because I haven’t got anything. Lucie: I know that I need to have my own activity, to do research. I need to find a more viable solution, something a bit less complicated, and I need to find time for research. Laure: Working from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. – this would surely be possible in another job. And then it would also be a solution that would mean that I wouldn’t need to ask for childcare. That’s a schedule that isn’t possible in my work, unless I choose to work in a laboratory, for example, but then I wouldn’t be satisfied professionally.

Magali’s case is particularly interesting and contrasts with Stéphanie’s evaluation of her job. Like Stephanie, Magali is a salesperson in the bakery section of a supermarket, but in contrast to Stephanie she talks of her professional activity in terms of career development. The importance she gives her work and career is part of her personal history. She arrived in the country from La Réunion, an island near Madagascar, in 1997; she completed a vocational qualification known as a brevet de technicien supérieur (BTS) and then was unemployed for two years before working in temporary jobs until the birth of her son, Enzo. She looked after him for a year and a half and then felt that it was time for her to join the job market, which she obviously appreciates and experiences as a means to make progress in life.

6 Conclusion: Constraints and feelings of pressure In this chapter, we demonstrate that constraints and feelings of pressure are crucial issues when considering work-life conflicts and the work-life balance for working caregivers. Obligations coming from traditional notions of gender roles are not the sole source of conflicts. In addition, the different experiences of subjective daily pressure according to the different generations, the different stages in life and the different caring responsibilities of the working caregivers are objective sources of conflict

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in complex care situations. In order to make these experiences more explicit, we made a distinction in this chapter between the levels of constraint, on the one hand and the feelings of pressure on the other hand. We argue that it is possible to identify a series of potential constraints related to family configuration, working conditions or the social situation of the working caregivers that all contribute to high everyday stress levels. However, one of the main results of our research is that feelings of pressure related to the difficulties of juggling work and care are not only due to the (objective) accumulation of constraints. The parents of young children as well as the adult children caring for their elderly parents in our sample are confronted with many different constraints, and their accumulation can lead in some cases to an unbearable situation of pressure. Yet our analysis of the family situations shows that the way these constraints are experienced varies from one caregiver to another, depending on the representations and the feelings of the caregivers. By distinguishing between the objective factors of tension (such as the lack of free time) and the subjective impression – or feeling – of pressure, we point out the importance of how the caregivers depict their own constraints. Starting from an initial definition of the feeling of pressure as the difficulties that families encounter when juggling work and care responsibilities, we then developed a typology of the subjective aspects contributing to this feeling of pressure, which is related not only to the objective constraints of the situation but also to the way in which the caregivers experienced this situation in their everyday lives. One of the factors that need to be considered in assessing the feeling of pressure is the importance of the quality of the care arrangement and the feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction related to it. Empirical evidence shows that care arrangements that are considered satisfactory reduce the feeling of pressure on caregivers of children and of old parents alike. On the contrary, if the caregiver feels the care arrangement is a solution ‘by default’, this leads to a greater feeling of pressure even in situations where the levels of constraints are relatively low. The nature of the relationship between the siblings and between the caregiver and the dependant is the second factor we need to take into account in the evaluation of the feeling of pressure. For instance, caregiving is experienced in a different way depending on whether the caregiver is an only child, whether the tasks between the brothers and the sisters are shared in a straightforward way, but also whether the different family members have similar priorities and share the same point of view with regard to the care arrangements. A third element we have identified is the representation of one’s role as a caregiver. Here, different factors for childcare and for care of the elderly contribute to accentuating or alleviating the feeling of pressure for the caregivers. Parents taking care of their children, for instance, attach much importance to the time they spend with them, whereas adult chilworking carers ‘living under pressure’ in france

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dren taking care of their parents are under the influence of a ‘gift and debt caring relationship’ that also influences their feeling of pressure. The question linking both cases is the issue of ‘ideals of care’ related to norms and social obligations. The last element to take into consideration is one’s representation as a worker. Often, the caregiver’s attachment to work goes beyond the issue of financial necessity and has more to do with self-fulfilment and social identity. Work has a ‘respite effect’ on care because it protects the caregiver from an overinvestment of his/her role, thereby contributing to maintaining the caregiver’s work-life balance. The level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction at work can increase or reduce the level of pressure felt by the caregiver. Another, more subjective element that can influence one’s representation as a worker is the caregiver’s social trajectory. If the identity given by one’s work fails to correspond to personal or familial expectations, this leads to dissatisfaction, and conversely, a profession that meets the caregiver’s own aspirations is considered satisfactory. Whether or not they are satisfied with their professional life can influence the caregivers’ feeling of pressure about the care arrangement and the care situation, especially when the caregiver’s professional situation is (no longer) experienced in a positive way. What is important, therefore, is having the feeling of ‘being in one’s rightful place’ in the social sphere.

Note 1.

According to a French national survey conducted at the end of the 1990s, only 2% of caregivers gave up working due to their role as caregivers (Le Bihan & Martin 2006).

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References Attias-Donfut, C., Lapierre, N. and Segalen, M. (2002), Le nouvel esprit de famille, Paris: Odile Jacob. Baudelot, C. and Gollac, M. (2006), Travailler pour être heureux, Paris, Fayard. Bertrand, D. (2010), ‘Les services de soins à domicile en 2008’, Etudes et Résultats, n° 739, 8 pages. Burau, V., Theobald, H. and Blank, R.H. (2007), Governing Home Care. A CrossNational Comparison, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Carmichael, F. and Charles, S. (1998), ‘The Labor market costs of community care’, Journal of Health Economics, 17, 747-765. Concialdi, P. (2006), ‘La France précarisée: un état des lieux’, in M. Husson (ed.), Travail flexible, salariés jetables, fausses questions et vrais enjeux de la lutte contre le chomage en France, Paris: La Découverte.

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Crompton, R. (2006), Employment and the Family. The Reconfiguration of Work and Family Life in Contemporary Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Da Roit, B. and Le Bihan, B. (2011), ‘Cash for Care Schemes and the Changing Role of Elderly People’s Informal Caregivers in France and Italy’, in B. PfauEffinger and T. Rostgaard (eds.), Care between Work and Welfare in European Societies, Hampshire: Palgrave: 177-203. DARES (2009), Premières Synthèses, n° 22.2, 7 pages. Garner, H., Méda, D. and Senik, C. (2006), ‘La place du travail dans les identités’, Economie et Statistiques, n° 393-394: 21-40. Hakim, C. (2000), Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kremer, M. (2007), How Welfare States Care. Culture, Gender and Parenting in Europe, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Le Bihan, B. and Martin, C. (2006), ‘Family and work in France: Innovative experiences in care services’, in G. Rossi (ed.), Reconciling Family and Work: New Challenges for Social Policies in Europe, Milano: Franco Angeli: 101-118. Le Bihan, B. and Martin, C. (2008), ‘Caring for dependent elderly parents and family configurations’, in R. Jallinoja and E. Widmer (eds.), Beyond the Nuclear Family: Families in a Configurational Perspectives, NY/Oxford: Peter Lang: 57-74. Le Bihan, B. and Martin, C. (2010), ‘Reforming long term care policies in France: Public/private complementarities’, Social Policy & Administration, 44 (4): 392-410. Lewis, J. (ed.) (2000), Gender, Social Care and Welfare State Restructuring in Europe, London: Ashgate. Maruani, M. (2011), Travail et emploi des femmes, Paris: La Découverte. Mattingly, M.J. and Bianchi, S.M. (2003), ‘Gender differences in the quantity and quality of free time: The US experience’, Social Forces, 81: 999-1029. Mattingly, M.J. and Sayer, L.C. (2006), ‘Under pressure: Gender differences in the relationship between free time and feeling rushed’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 68: 205-221. Méda, D. and Périvier, H. (2007), Le deuxième sexe de l’émancipation. La société, les femmes et l’emploi, Paris: Le Seuil. Périvier, H. (2006), ‘L’emploi des femmes ou le statu quo inégalitaire’, Alternatives économiques, «Spécial élections 2007», n° 28: 75-77. Petite, S. and Weber, A. (2006), ‘Les effets de l’Allocation personnalisée d’autonomie sur l’aide dispensée aux personnes âgées’, Etudes et résulats, n° 459, 11 pages. Regnier-Loilier, A. (2009), ‘L’arrivée d’un enfant modifie-t-elle la répartition des tâches domestiques au sein du couple?’, Population & Sociétés, 461. Sayer, L.C. (2005), ‘Gender, time and inequality: Trends in women’s and men’s paid work, unpaid work and free time’, Social Forces, 84: 285-303. Ungerson, C. (2005), ‘Care, work and feeling’, Sociological Review, 53: 188-203.

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6 Negotiating work and care in a changing welfare regime The case of Portugal Karin Wall, Sanda Samitca and Sónia Correia

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1

Introduction

The main aim of this chapter is to examine how families in Portugal caring for young children or old people in need of care reconcile their work and caring responsibilities. As in other southern European countries, important changes have taken place over the last few decades that have affected the balance between work and family life. Female activity rates have been rising since the 1960s, reaching 69 per cent in 2008, and changes in both the attitudes to and the economic behaviour of women have led to the continuing decline of the male breadwinner model. At the policy level, Portuguese society has been faced with the task of reorganising the care of children and old people, leading to developments in both leave policies and service provision. Recent analysis of demographic and work-family trends reveals both commonalities and differences in relation to the southern European pattern (Wall & Escobedo 2010; Wall & Nunes 2010). Common factors include the ageing of the population and a growing demand for care, a certain feminisation of migrant flows and a strong ideological commitment to the family. What distinguishes Portugal from other southern European countries is the percentage of women working full-time, the high female participation rate in the labour market, a policy orientation emphasising gender equality, and the state’s commitment from the 1980s to expand publicly subsidised care services. The specificity of the Portuguese context represents a major research challenge. If the nature of work-family policies is evolving in specific ways, then it is important to understand how this process affects and interacts with the care norms and practices of families, in particular with the long-standing influence of a familialistic culture stressing strong intergenerational obligations. Drawing on a comprehensive perspective that emphasises the need to view family policies within a wider social, historical and normative context (Neyer et al. 2008), our approach seeks to understand how current care arrangements are embedded in changing policy, the labour market, the family and the gender culture.

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The importance of path dependency, especially the impact of past policies and practices, must not be underestimated (Pfau-Effinger & Geissler 2005; Crompton 2006; Kamerman & Moss 2010). Work/family and gender equality policies were formulated comparatively late in Portugal. Until the late 1970s, policies and societal norms emphasised unsupported familialism (Leitner 2003) based on female home care and obligations. Understanding the complex linkages between this policy process and caregivers’ experiences of managing work and care will therefore be a major focus of our analysis. Current arrangements for childcare and the care of old people are expected to reveal and illustrate the developments and some of the specific trends in policies over the last few decades. In this chapter we first examine major trends in policies related to work/life balance in Portuguese society. Then we address caregivers’ strategies for managing work and care. A social care approach, taking into consideration all social forms of care, underpins our analysis (Antonnen & Sipila 1996; Lewis 1998). Drawing on in-depth interviews with caregivers who have either standard or atypical full-time working hours, the aim is to understand how families perceive and negotiate the care of young children and old people in need of care.

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2 Major trends regarding the development of policies To understand care norms and practices in Portugal, it is essential to look at policy developments in a historical context. The contrast in care policies before and after the Revolution in 1974 is of particular importance. For nearly 50 years, during the right-wing Salazar dictatorship, explicit pro-traditional and pro-natalist family policies promoted a male breadwinner model emphasising women’s subordinate role and obligation to care, and men’s role as head of the family and provider (Torres 2006; Wall 2011). Gender inequality in marriage and professional life and female responsibility for homemaking were written into the Constitution (article 1677, 1966), and the importance of female housework and the care of others was promoted by the state, the church and women’s organisations. Despite the sharp turn in family policies after Portugal’s transition to democracy, the impact of this normative context, which emphasised ‘unsupported familialism’ during most of the twentieth century, must be borne in mind. Several generations of women, including those who are in their fifties and sixties today, were brought up during the dictatorship; moreover, cultural norms relating to the value of intergenerational support for family well-being were strongly incorporated into family cultures and routines. Care policies after the transition to democracy followed a specific pathway, with a strong focus on state responsibilities to support full-time working for men and women as well as a gradual move towards a specific

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‘welfare mix’ combining a plurality of providers (state, family, third sector, market) and establishing strong linkages between care and gender equality policies. To summarise developments in this area, three periods may be identified (Wall 2011; Wall & Escobedo 2010). The first ten years after the revolution marked an important turning point in the political-juridical framework governing families and women’s rights. Family policy became implicit and moved into the shadow of social and gender-equality policies, leading to major legal changes in women’s rights and promoting a new care model centred on conjugal equality, dual earning, and public support for care through developments in leave and childcare services. A well-paid ‘early return to work’ maternal leave policy was introduced in 1976, with a job-protected, fully compensated leave of three months for employed women. The need to set up a public network of services (a new constitutional principle) was also recognised; nevertheless, services to support families developed slowly during these initial years. The first significant shift in work/family policies occurred in the late 1980s and the 1990s, with a focus on ‘parental’ care rather than just maternal care, and new policies for the expansion of services. By the early 1990s, female activity rates had risen to 41 per cent (up from 19 per cent in 1970), female part-time work continued to be low (16 per cent), and maternal employment – as revealed by the activity rates of women in the younger age groups (79 per cent for women aged 25-34 in 1993) – was already high. Leave schemes were developed and made more generous: individual entitlement to parental leave was introduced, along with the right to miss work for 30 days to care for a sick child and 15 days to care for a sick adult relative. In addition, parents were entitled to a two-hour work reduction during the first year of the child’s life, and some new cash benefits were introduced, including a low flat-rate benefit for old people needing care provided by a third person. A new governmental framework to expand services through the public subsidising of non-profit institutions was set up via legislation on the legal status of non-profit provider institutions – designated as private institutions of social solidarity – and the institutionalisation of yearly agreements concerning the flat-rate subsidy paid by the state per child or old person. From the start, services were required to have full-time opening hours, allowing working caregivers to ‘reconcile’ work and family life. Payment was based on one’s income. This policy direction encouraging service provision led in the 1980s and early 1990s to a modest but steady increase in childcare services for the three to six years age group (with an attendance rate of 56 per cent by 1994/95) and children under the age of three (attendance rate of 12 per cent). This occurred at the same time as care services began to undergo a gradual process of hybridisation, mixing private non-profit, public and private profit-making services (Evers 1995). As a result, childcare arrangements for babies aged one to two gradually became more pluralis-

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tic: according to the first National Survey on Families with Children (1999), the formal childcare solution (crèche) was used by one-fifth of those families whose children were born in the 1990s (compared to 7 per cent of families with children born in the 1970s). Other care arrangements included paid childminders, grandparents and domestic employees (Wall 2005). Within the family, grandparents were the main caregivers; of the ‘semi-formal’ solutions, paid childminders (either unlicensed or overseen by a public or subsidised crèche) were the main caregivers while domestic employees – a solution only affordable in high-income families – were a minority. For children over the age of three, the use of services increased rapidly: by 2001, 78 per cent of those between the ages of three and six were in pre-school (full-time, and mostly in public rather than third-sector institutions). Compared with childcare arrangements, the reliance of elderly people in need of care on family and home-based care remained strong. Three factors may be seen to have contributed to this difference. First, expectations that old people in need of care are best cared for at home and by their spouses and children continued to be widespread, not only due to financial reasons (most of those who worked during the dictatorship have very low pensions) but also due to cultural and interactional factors. Residential nursing homes were originally set up for the destitute and those with no family care and were therefore seen for a long time as a ‘last resort’. At the same time, we have to remember that the co-residence of three generations in the same household was particularly common until the 1970s and 1980s, mainly for economic reasons, declining sharply only from the 1990s onwards (Wall 2005). As a result, intergenerational living arrangements are still widely accepted socially in case of needy elderly parents. Third, care policies in the 1970s and 1980s focused heavily on the problem of work/life balance for working parents, whereas policies for the elderly focused on their health and pension situation. In the latter case, the emphasis was on ‘invalidity’ rather than ‘dependency’ in old age, and the embedding of elderly people in a care arrangement including full-time working relatives was largely overlooked. This aspect of policy, related to service provision to support families caring for elderly people, only emerged gradually, very much in line with the demographic ageing and the rising life expectancy of the Portuguese population, and also in response to the rising pressure from families needing support to provide better quality care and to reconcile work and care. Daycare centres for the elderly were first set up in 1976 as part of a pilot project (50 centres, including some home help), with homehelp services being formally recognised only in 1985 as a separate solution or one that is integrated with daycare centres. For elderly people, therefore, the above-mentioned logic of partnership between state and non-profit institutions, in which publicly subsidised services and diversification of services were emphasised, was slower to emerge. This in fact reveals the difficulties in keeping pace

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with growing needs. In spite of an initial increase in home help and daycare centres, both largely provided by the third sector since the late 1980s but also by the private sector, coverage rates in the early 1990s were as low as 1.2 per cent for home-help services and between 1 and 4 per cent in the different regions for daycare centres. However, daycare centres became especially important over the years, as they provide for the elderly who live at home but need meals, personal care and socialising with others rather than full-time nursing (São José & Wall 2006). Compared with childcare centres, however, opening hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) have always been shorter and therefore less responsive to situations in which the elderly person is reliant on working family members who are caring for them before or after daycare. In the context of lower economic constraints, at least until 2008, as well as a policy outlook that set specific goals in terms of leave and services (also encouraged by European directives and recommendations), developments over the last decade represent a period of some expansion and consolidation in the work/family policies outlined above (Wall et al. 2011). Linkages between family policy, gender equality and full-time employment continue to be strong (female activity rates for the 25-34 age group had risen to 87 per cent by 2008). In the parental leave system, the emphasis is still on a well-paid ‘early return to full-time work’ model, but it has been made more generous, both for fathers and mothers, and more dependent on gender-sharing: paid paternity leave increased to four weeks, and an optional bonus month for fathers allows parents to take up to six months of well-paid leave (at 100 per cent of previous earnings) (Wall & Leitão 2010). In contrast, the leave model for caregivers of the elderly has hardly changed, even if the new labour law (2008) grants more days off work to care for sick adult relatives and stresses the right to different types of flexible working, such as the ‘continuous’ working day (six hours with no lunch break). From the perspective of service provision, developments have also reinforced the particular ‘welfare mix’ that took shape in the 1990s, combining informal, formal and semi-formal care solutions (Pfau-Effinger 2007) as well as a variety of service providers. From the point of view of parental care, two policy measures should be mentioned: the focus on the expansion of crèches for children under the age of three, with enrolment of children aged zero to two rising to 47 per cent in 2008, above the EU average (OECD 2010); and the introduction of a full-time (eighthour) school day in all primary schools, with obligatory pre- and afterschool services. Pressure for more state responsibility in expanding the publicly subsidised third sector for the under-three age group is high, with working parents and institutions pointing to the need for more places in third-sector crèche facilities for low-income families. For children below the age of three, grandparental care is an important alternative care arrangement, often supported by paediatricians as well, but parental sharing of care with alternate working schedules or a ‘semi-formal’

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arrangement with a paid childminder also emerge as alternatives. Overall, though, public opinion is strongly in favour of delegating childcare to crèches and nurseries, even if there is some hesitation as to the best age at which to start (six months, one year or two years). Most caregivers consider age two rather than age three the ideal age at which to integrate into a full-time nursery. As one grandfather puts it:

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The nursery is good for them; it makes them more active – we can see the difference between those who are in playschool and those who are not. At home, they don’t develop so well. Also, after a while we can tell that they want to be with other children, a two-year-old wants to be with other children. So now she is in playschool all day and we take care of her after school and during the holidays, before my daughter and son-in-law begin their holidays.

Grandparental care to help manage the fringes of care is recognised as an important aspect of work-family balance. For elderly people, both the ‘home-based’ and the ‘semi-home-based’ (daycare centre) care solutions have been promoted in all regions of the country, mainly as a consequence of the high value placed on ageing ‘in one’s own home’. This value has much to do with the idea of maintaining elderly people’s autonomy, but it is also rooted in the high costs of institutionalisation and the longstanding negative attitudes towards residential homes – often described as ‘warehouses’ for the elderly (São José & Wall 2006; Samitca & Wall 2008). Publicly subsidised home-help services and daycare centres are universal but depend on means-testing and are paid according to income, which means that only very low-income families (below the minimum national wage of 485 euros in 2011) are entitled to free services. But even if payment is low, it may represent a significant amount, especially if there is nobody (i.e. no children) to help pay for this. Attitudes to residential care have nevertheless been changing, not only due to the overburdening of family caregivers but also to the increase in certain types of prolonged dementia, as well as the recognition of the need for high-quality medical and nursing care in some situations. The expansion of services has therefore included increasing the number and quality of nursing homes, along with residential care for convalescence and terminal care (introduced in 2006 under the concept of a national network of ‘continued care’ facilities).1 This process of diversification has relied on partnerships between the state and non-profit organisations as well as the expansion of private nursing homes. By 2009, coverage rates for the population over age 65 had increased substantially but were still average in European terms: 3.8 per cent for residential care, 3.4 per cent for daycare centres and 4.9 per cent for home-help services (10.4 per cent for those over the age of 75).2

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Waiting lists for places in low-cost publicly subsidised residential homes continue to be long, which means that many families caring for people with extensive care needs are looking to relieve themselves of their heavy care burden, but often find it difficult to find affordable residential care. As a result, other solutions, such as an informal paid caregiver (either national or foreign), are sometimes used by families, especially for people with extensive care needs. Brazilian live-in care workers who speak Portuguese are the preferred solution, leading to some increase over the last decade in care migration chains from Brazil (Wall & Nunes 2010). However, in contrast to the ‘migrant in the family’ care model in Italy, this semi-formal care arrangement is a marginal rather than a predominant care arrangement due to its high cost. As the cash benefit for elderly people is low – the benefit is needs-tested and works out at about 170 euros for the higher levels of dependency in 2011) – and does not cover the cost of a paid informal caregiver, the solution is more frequently used in high-income families. In summary, the restructuring of care for elderly people in Portugal has led to a mixed-care model including both home-based and residential care, both family and paid informal caregivers, and both publicly subsidised and private service provision. Coverage levels for service provision are modest, and the normative context stresses the value of ageing in one’s own home and intergenerational support, thus putting the emphasis on the balance between families’ responsibilities to care and the welfare state’s responsibility to support and provide services.

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3 Data and samples Drawing on in-depth interviews with working caregivers who have either standard or atypical full-time working hours, we now examine the different types of care arrangements as well as the caregivers’ subjective perspectives on managing care and work. We first discuss care for elderly people before turning our attention to childcare. Our analysis of care for elderly people draws on in-depth interviews carried out in 2008 with 23 respondents (19 women and 4 men) working and caring for an elderly relative with an average or high level of care needs and cared for within a home-based or semi-home-based care arrangement. Of the 23 respondents, 11 were taking care of their mother, 5 were taking care of their father, 5 more were taking care of both parents, 2 for their parents-in-law and 1 for an aunt. All the main caregivers interviewed (aged between 33 and 55, one aged 60) were heavily involved in the care arrangement, either through hands-on caring tasks and/or responsibility for the management of the caring arrangement. The majority worked full-time (40 hours per week) with predictable working hours and during the daytime; only five respondents had an atypical work schedule (working in shifts or long working hours). Professional activities

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included high-skilled as well as low-skilled jobs (Samitca et al. 2008). Half of all the respondents lived with their elderly relative: most of them had brought the elderly relative to live with them, but two had always lived in the same house as the relative. The data used for analysis on childcare draws on in-depth interviews with 21 families caring for at least one child below the age of ten (Wall et al. 2009). Only the mothers, whose ages ranged from 21 to 46, were interviewed. The majority were married or cohabiting (14), while six were single or divorced. The sample also included a wide range of educational levels and a variety of professional activities, including high-skilled jobs, jobs requiring some professional qualifications and unskilled workers. All couples are dual-earner couples and all parents work fulltime (at least 40 hours per week), many of them with long working hours. A few – mainly fathers but also a few mothers – have shift work, irregular timetables or extra work.

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4 Working and caring for an elderly parent with care needs As described above, care for elderly people in Portugal has changed and developed, moving from an unsupported family-centred model in the 1980s to a mixed-care model. While care provided by the family is highly valued, together with the idea of keeping the elderly dependant at home, changes in policies, the labour market and families have led to a mixedcare model in which complementarity between the state and the ‘caring family’ is seen as the desired norm. A good example of new expectations emphasising intergenerational support in the context of more state responsibility for service provision is the wish expressed by some caregivers for nursing homes that are geographically close by. José and his wife (a dual-earner couple both in their 50s, both administrative employees,) took care of his mother in their home while she had a medium level of care needs; when she became bed-ridden and needed permanent care, they searched for a nursing home nearby (a private profit-making home, more expensive but affordable if his mother’s pension was pooled with a quarter of his salary). For José, the main advantage was that he could go and see his mother every day before going home. Ideally, then, when elderly people with care needs are at home, familialism supported by services is the preferred solution; when the elderly person is taken into residential care, the preferred option should be institutional care supported by familialism. Another important trend is that commitment to their working lives and careers is a key aspect for all interviewees and common to all the care arrangements, whatever the type of work carried out by the caregiver. In spite of the large amount of stress endured, the working caregivers we met are not prepared to stop working. Nobody can imagine

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leaving their job or applying for an early (reduced) pension, and they would also prefer to keep the elderly relative at home for as long as possible rather than putting him/her in a nursing home. This means that they have to organise complex care arrangements, usually based on a patchwork combining both informal caregivers and services, in order to continue working while caring for their elderly parents. Furthermore, they insist on the fact that a working life and career is essential not only in terms of financial resources but also because it has a major ‘buffer’ effect: work helps the caregiver to face the daily burden of a demanding care activity as well as strengthening their capacity to endure a long-term situation that is expected to become worse over time. Whereas caregivers are to a large extent ready to give up on their personal life (leisure, holidays) and even to some extent their family and conjugal life, professional activities emerge as a sphere of life to be protected. Carla, a 37-year-old divorced administrative worker with an eight-year-old son caring for both her parents, says:

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I wouldn’t put up with the situation if I had to leave my job. For me, it is like this: if I want to help, I need a distraction, don’t I? And my work is the distraction I have.

As a result, in situations of ‘work-care squeeze’, most caregivers prefer to negotiate their occasional need to miss work or apply for some flexibility in working hours rather than consider giving up their job. Working families develop complex and varied patterns of care arrangements in order to cope with work and care responsibilities for the elderly people who live with them. Interviews reveal two major strategies. Combining informal and formal care is a common strategy (covering half of our interviewed families). Given the above-mentioned developments in policies and contexts, it is currently emerging as the predominant strategy. However, these mixed-care arrangements may vary considerably since they are affected by several factors such as the elderly person’s needs and wishes, the availability of other family caregivers (e.g. the elderly person’s partner or other relatives) and the caregivers’ expectations and their capacity or desire to access or buy in certain types of services. A second strategy is to rely exclusively on caring by family members. Given the strong family obligations and the preferred norm of ageing in one’s own home, this solution continues to be considered – both by the elderly dependants and their caregivers – as a satisfactory care arrangement when care needs are manageable and when several members of the family are available to share the care. Drawing on the interviews, we can describe four different types of mixed-care arrangements relying in different ways and proportions on family care, semi-formal care (paid informal care, non-professional or professional) and formal services, either home-based or institutionbased (daycare centre). The daytime delegation to a daycare centre seems

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to be a preferred solution for elderly people with average or average-tohigh care needs but who are still able to move unaided. Daycare centres are usually open eight hours a day during the week, and they fetch and bring the elderly person home. Pedro, a 48-year-old married policeman, cares for his 77-year-old widowed mother, who lives on her own near his house. He has three other brothers, two of whom live far away and one who lives close by and shares some of the care responsibilities, even if he is less available than Pedro. Thanks to his fairly regular and predictable work schedule, Pedro manages to go to his mother’s house every morning to help her bathe, dress and take her medicine (his wife fills in for him when he has a night shift). From Monday to Friday, his mother goes to the nearby daycare centre (from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) so she has company, meals and activities during the daytime (take-away meals are also available for the evening meal). In the evening it is his brother who goes to see her, and on weekends they also share the mornings and the evenings. But Pedro is the one who manages other care situations, such as his mother’s medical appointments or driving his mother to the doctor or elsewhere (shopping) when necessary. Overall, he thinks the daycare centre has a positive effect on his mother’s health and also allows him, as the main caregiver, not to worry about leaving her alone during the day:

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Maybe the daycare centre is better [than being at home]. She moves more, she needs to go out every morning and comes back in the afternoon, she has to move, it is beneficial for her, I think. The advantage is that she feels better, she likes the other persons there, food and conviviality are very good too; there is a range of factors like these that she really appreciates.

The daycare centre is also the arrangement used by Ana, a 60-year-old insurance professional who is married with no children, caring for her 83-year-old father who lives with her and goes to a care centre every day. Although he still manages to eat and dress alone, he cannot be left alone during the day: I am very happy [with the daycare centre]; it was necessary. To have somebody at home would also be a solution but it would have to be somebody full-time and it was very difficult. Difficult to organise and economically also. But if the daycare solution didn’t exist I would have somebody at home. […]

Care arrangements combining family care and home-help services are another form of mixed-care arrangement; they are an alternative solution to the daycare centre for elderly people with average or even average-tohigh care needs who have difficulty moving. Home help is used by Dolores, a 37-year-old full-time school helper who is married and has one nine-year-old son. Dolores lives with her parents and takes care of her

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elderly mother with some help from her father (who watches over her during the day). From Monday to Friday, her mother is visited by a professional from a private non-profit daycare centre who comes to do her personal hygiene, dress her and deliver meals. On the weekends it is Dolores who performs all the care tasks as well as looking after her son and doing all the household tasks (her husband does not help her). Dolores feels that caring for her mother takes up too much of her energy and time. She would like to have more support and feels extremely overburdened; she also feels that her son is suffering from this situation, as she is not able to give him enough attention. However, she does not wish to put her mother in a nursing home. In summary, both these mixed-care arrangements allow the main caregiver to provide care and continue working full-time, but this comes at the cost of much pressure and stress for the main caregiver. Although during the week, the caregiver has to deal with fewer demands due to some relief being provided by professional services, the weekends and the evenings often involve much hands-on care. Moreover, the burden is even greater when the main caregiver has other care and housework responsibilities and little support from family members such as partners or siblings. In these cases, more typical of women caregivers in low-income couples where the wife does most of the housework and the level of income makes it difficult to buy in domestic help or products (Saraceno 2010), the burden is also associated with long hours of housework and no respite time (Wall, Crompton & Lyonnette 2007). Another form of mixed-care arrangements is the paid non-professional in the family. In situations of high care needs, when the person being cared for lives in his/her home but cannot be left alone, the main caregiver may organise an arrangement based on the delegation of care to a paid non-professional caregiver (migrant or national) who is present during the day, at night or both (living-in), and sometimes on the weekends. The pressure is thus partly relieved by the presence of somebody on a regular basis who is at home with the elderly person. The solution not only reduces the caregivers’ worries, it also relieves him/her from handson tasks and the need to be a regular or permanent presence. In some cases, the paid caregiver stays with the elderly person during the week and the main caregiver takes over on the weekends; in other cases, the main caregiver has the support of other relatives. This is the type of care arrangement set up by João, a 49-year-old finance manager who is married with two daughters aged six and 13, and with one brother living abroad: I was here with the problem in my hands. On the one hand my mother couldn’t stay alone and on the other hand I also had my family and my job. So the situation was very difficult to deal with in the beginning when I had nobody to help. What helped me was that I have an aunt who is retired and who was a very precious help, since she stayed here [with his mother] during

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the day and sometimes at night. It was impossible for her [his mother] to stay alone at home. For more or less two months it was a very difficult time for me, exhausting, since I used my lunch break to go to the hospital to visit my father … and when I left work I went to my parents’ house to be with my mother. One day I slept there, the other day it was my aunt and I had some rest and could stay with my family. But the situation wasn’t easy at all … Then the alternative we found was to pay somebody to stay 24 hours with them [before his father’s death] and this lady is still there nowadays to care for my mother and we [the two brothers] pay her. My aunt helps out one weekend every fortnight and I do the other weekend.

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The main benefit and relief for the caregiver is to know that their elderly parent is cared for and not left alone on practically a 24-hour basis. Caregivers feel freer and less stressed even if they have to oversee the arrangement and take on some care tasks. However, a full-time paid caregiver at home is a significant cost (between 700 and 2,000 euros per month), rarely affordable on the basis of the elderly person’s pension, and is mainly used by high-income families. Nevertheless, since it is seen as a good solution for reconciling work and home-based care for the elderly person, some average-income families will sometimes make an effort to access this type of arrangement. In a few situations, the mixed-care arrangement combines both paid non-professional care and professional services. This multiple delegation care arrangement is highly valued in situations when constant care and nursing are required. The elderly person is cared for at home within a complex assortment of paid informal and formal services. This is the case of André, a 47-year-old film programmer who is single and an only child, whose parents have the following provision of services: homebased publicly subsidised services during the day; a privately paid professional caregiver who takes on care in the evening; a nearby restaurant providing meals when necessary; a domestic employee who comes twice a week; and a nurse (paid privately) who comes twice a week: From the moment I had trustworthy persons, who handle things better than I do since they are professionals, I felt relieved. I only have to phone to know if they are in pain … But my life now, I feel freer. I keep going to their place after work and during the weekends, but I feel freer.

This is the most sophisticated situation found in our sample of caregivers, involving a mix of different paid formal (private and publicly subsidised) services, and it seems to be a good example of the complex mix of caregivers that are needed in order to cover the round-the-clock needs of an old person at home who has a high level of care needs. Due to its high cost, however, it is not equally accessible to all families. Apart from mixed-care arrangements, family care arrangements organised around one family caregiver or, more frequently, a network of fa-

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mily members, were also common among our sample, representing half of all care arrangements. This type of care arrangement is more associated with situations of low (or low to medium) care needs. However, in exceptional cases this may also happen in cases of medium to high care needs. Often it is the elderly person who refuses to have a stranger coming into the house and providing care; this usually leads to a burdensome situation requiring significant efforts and flexibility in the workplace in order to reconcile schedules and needs. This is the experience of Célia – a 42-year-old low-skilled administrative worker, divorced, with one adult son – who cares for and lives with her elderly mother. She has two sisters, both of whom used to be part of the care arrangement, but since they had an argument and are no longer on speaking terms, Célia has cared for their mother on her own. The latter does not want to go to a nursing home and also refuses to be cared for at home by anybody except her daughters.

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When she [Célia’s sister] was at home, since I worked late she cared for my mother, so I didn’t have to wake up early or wake her at 6 in the morning, which is what I have to do now. She [Célia’s sister] was the one to do her personal hygiene in the morning, to give her breakfast and medicines and my other sister came back at midday to give her soup. Now it is more complicated, I have to wake up at 6 in the morning, to care for her, go to work, leave her something to eat for mid-morning and then at midday I go home to give her lunch and then I leave something for the afternoon until I come back at 17.30.

To be able to reconcile work and care, Célia has to have some flexibility in her working schedule; her colleagues and her boss are understanding, giving her more time to go home in the lunch hour and taking pressure off her when she has to arrive late or go home earlier. Although she could have chosen a continuous working day, Célia prefers this solution, as it gives her time to go home during the lunch hour. Even so, Célia feels permanently stressed, especially because her mother is alone all day long and she fears that something might happen. In most ‘family’ care arrangements, however, the main caregivers are supported by other family members, either on a regular basis or in a ‘rotational’ care scheme in which the elderly parent spends some time (one or two months) in each of the children’s homes (São José & Wall 2006; Pimentel 2005; São José 2007). When the person being cared for is still part of a couple, his/her spouse usually has an important role. Due to age and potential health problems, the spouse can seldom take on all the care tasks, but s/he plays a central role as ‘watch-over’ caregiver. This help is essential when the elderly parent cannot stay alone all day long while the main caregiver works. This is the case of Claudia, a 43-year-old, single, self-employed aesthetician working long and irregu-

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lar hours, who is her mother’s main caregiver with the support of her father and brother (all still living in the parents’ household).

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We help each other very much but it is my father who does most of the job during the day: he cares for her [his wife, Claudia’s mother], he takes her to the bathroom, and this happens six, seven or eight times a day. So he does most of it during the day and I take over when I come home. Therefore during the weekends I avoid going out in order to relieve him. When I am at home my father never cares for her, it is my brother and myself. We do this so that he can have a quieter weekend … Yes, now my life is really very limited.

Due to what she calls her ‘family spirit’, Claudia does not find it difficult, only very tiring, to care for her mother. She says she does not mind giving up her social life and has not had holidays for several years. Although she would like some more help at home, she explains that they cannot afford to buy in a paid non-professional caregiver, as her parents have low pensions and she is the main breadwinner; at the same time, they feel that they do not need the personal hygiene and meals offered by home-help services. However, she is conscious that if the situation should suddenly change (i.e. if her father also requires high levels of care), she will have to take the decision to put her mother in a nursing home. In spite of the diversity of existing services, we can see that respondents in these ‘family’ care arrangements do not have any formal or semi-formal support. This is sometimes the result of a deliberate choice, with respondents arguing that caregiving can be managed ‘in the family’, in particular while care needs are low. In other cases, as mentioned above, it is the elderly person in need of care who refuses to be cared for by strangers. But it can also be a more constrained choice in low-income families, mainly due to the fact that respondents are not entitled to free services and feel they cannot afford to or prefer not to spend any money on the fee (paid according to level of income). A final remark on the changing nature of care obligations: we mentioned above that the obligation to care for one’s elderly parents and one’s commitment to work are seen as two priorities in Portugal, especially by women but also by male caregivers nowadays, in particular when they are only children or do not have sisters. Drawing on the interviews described above, we can see that both commitments are strong and alive, but we can also detect some important changes in the perceptions of the family’s commitment to care. Caregivers are available to care and even to sacrifice important domains of their life, but they want to share the care burden either in the context of a strong family network or in the context of services that support them in their care duties. Moreover, the changing nature of intergenerational care responsibilities also comes across when we ask interviewees about their expectations regard-

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ing care when they themselves become dependent in old age. Many respondents insisted that it is essential and even normal for children to care for their elderly parents; however, given that it is such a heavy burden, they do not expect their own children to take on the same type of care responsibilities. In fact, some of them have even already thought about it and are planning alternative care solutions for themselves: João: I am already thinking and preparing my future. I don’t want to depend on my daughters … I am already thinking differently from my parents regarding nursing homes … I agree totally that at some point the best solution for an old person might be the nursing home, including the nursing home for myself and my wife. (Father of two daughters, caring for his mother)

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In summary, the arrangements described above seem to reveal significant linkages between policy developments and contexts over the last few decades and current care values and practices. The norm expressed by our interviewees of keeping the elderly person who needs care at home for as long as possible may be interpreted as a compromise between some of the benefits of familialistic obligations (ageing in one’s own home and being cared for by your children) and the advantages of a move towards a new – albeit modest – welfare mix emphasising efficient care and nursing, work-family balance, individual autonomy in old age, and support through diverse and flexible services adapted to the different stages of care needs (e.g. home-help services, full-time daycare, temporary or permanent residential care). In contrast to childcare (see below), the scale is only partially turned towards defamilialisation. In fact, the benefits of residential care are often openly questioned, even if viewed as unavoidable in some situations (both from the caregiver’s and the elderly person’s point of view), while home care based on delegation to ‘supported and supportive caring families’ is viewed and implemented as the preferred care arrangement.

5 Working and caring for young children The negotiation of the boundaries between the state and the family in the case of childcare differs from care for elderly people, since the process of defamilialisation has evolved more rapidly and consistently in the context of the specific labour market, gender equality, and educational and work/family policies. As described above, the provision of crèches, pre-schools and after-school activities has expanded continuously since the mid-1980s, and opening hours are long in all types of institutions (third sector, public and private profit), due to the assumption that both parents work full-time. Care support from the extended family, mainly grandparents, is strongly valued but is not always available. Recent research shows that grandparents are the most frequent providers of regu-

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lar or occasional care after school, on the weekends or during the holidays and they sometimes provide full-time childcare for children below the age of three. For different reasons, however, grandparental care is not always available: intense geographical mobility, women’s participation in the labour market over the life course, health problems and family conflicts are some of the factors that interrupt or reduce intergenerational support. Working-class parents in particular have lower levels of support from family networks (Wall et al. 2001). Moreover, the wish for less dependency on grandparental care in the context of couples’ growing economic and social autonomy is another aspect to be taken into account. Some of the parents interviewed prefer not to be too dependent on grandparental care since it may imply a difficult negotiation of childraising styles. In the context of these changes, one of the findings of our research is that all the care arrangements of interviewed families with young children aged three to ten rely on full-time formal care (pre-schools and schools); it is the patchwork of pre- and after-school care that varies. As a result, any variation in care arrangements for children aged three to ten depends more on family and gender variables – in particular the gendered negotiation of parental time before and after formal care – rather than on the choice between home-based care or institutional care, as was the case with care for elderly people. In contrast, below the age of three, the care arrangements are more diversified, sometimes relying on fulltime crèches from the end of parental leave, sometimes on grandparents, other times on parents who work and care in different shifts, and sometimes on the semi-formal solution of childminders or domestic employees. The shift in care values is another important trend: the parents we interviewed approve of state responsibility in early childhood education, advocate full-time opening hours and pre- and after-school care to support working parents. At the same time, they emphasise the importance of parental time (rather than ‘family’ time or ‘mother’ care), but in the context of full-time work rather than home care. For example, the idea of staying at home for longer after the birth of a child if well-paid leave were to be made more generous (beyond six months) is viewed as a possible positive option for parents, in particular until the age of one. Nevertheless, it is an option that respondents usually examine in the light of the importance of work both for the individual and the family. As one 33year-old mother of three young children who returned to work five months after each childbirth comments: The importance of work is enormous. Obviously financially it is very important, but not only for that reason. I had that experience: as I began to have children and stay at home on leave I began to understand how important it is for a person to have an occupation, a career, for several reasons. First, because I think that people who work outside the home are much more

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valued. When you are at home on leave, everyone thinks you are on holiday. Of course, you work three times as much … But also because if you stay away from your job for a long time, you begin to get left behind, you lose contact.

If doubts are expressed in relation to staying away from work for too long, this is contrasted by the strong approval expressed for a reduction in working hours (rather than part-time work) as well as standard (rather than long) working days when children are very young, very much in line with parents’ current entitlement to two hours’ work reduction during the first year of the child’s life. Full-time crèches are therefore also seen as an important care solution as long as children do not stay for long hours, beyond the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule, in order to make room for parental time. Drawing on the interviews, we can identify four main types of care arrangements that rely in different ways and proportions on parental care, grandparental care, semi-formal care (i.e. paid informal care) and full-time formal services, even if the latter are always present in the care arrangements of children over the age of three. Care arrangements emphasising parental care may be either mothercentred or shared parental (which was the case in six out of the 20 care arrangements). In the mother-centred arrangement it is the working mother who is the manager of care and the main caregiver of the child, which involves collecting and dropping off the children, being available and providing care after school and on the weekends, and missing work when a child is ill. In this arrangement, there is only occasional support from the father and/or grandparents. The mothers who take on this pivotal role usually have full-time standard working hours, but their husbands often have long or atypical working hours and are less involved in care. On the other hand, grandparental support is irregular or non-existent due to health problems and/or geographical distance. Teresa, a 41year-old administrative worker in a public hospital working 9-to-5, takes her seven-year-old daughter to school and picks her up at 5.30 p.m. every day and then cares for her in the evening; her husband does not participate in the daily care arrangement and her parents, who do not live close by, only give her some support on the weekends or in an emergency. In this type of care arrangement, mothers mention tiredness and stress from being the ‘pivotal’ caregiver and having little support, and this pressure increases when there is more than one child. Matilde is a 40-yearold administrative worker working 9-to-5, with three-year-old triplets in a full-time third-sector nursery since they were nine months old: At night and at weekends when my husband is working it seems to me that the weekend is never-ending, Monday always seems a long way away. Caring for them alone is tiring, they only ask for their mother, caring for them alone

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at home is very … they are very demanding, it’s very hard. He would like to help me more, but it’s always me.

Matilde’s husband works in shifts and most weekends; there is no support from her parents-in-law, who live far away, and only occasional support from Matilde’s parents, mainly in emergencies when one of the triplets is ill (as they are both quite elderly they feel unable to care for the three children at the same time). In the shared parental care arrangement (three cases), both parents are involved in caring and domestic tasks, sharing all the daily activities such as collecting and dropping off, preparing meals, bathing or putting to bed. Veronica, a 41-year-old school teacher working from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. one day a week and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on the other days, shares childcare tasks with her 42-year-old husband, a civil servant working from 10 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. They rotate dropping off and collecting their two children, aged three and seven, from crèche/school as well as all the caring and domestic tasks in the evening: the father bathes the children and cooks the evening meal while Veronica takes care of the laundry and ironing, helps with homework, lays the table and cleans up after supper; they put the children to bed together. They also have occasional support from Veronica’s parents, both for household tasks and childcare, even if her mother is less available now because she is caring for an elderly mother with extensive care needs. Stress is linked to the many daily chores and activities as well as having little time for personal or conjugal life. As Veronica says,

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Family life and conjugal life is difficult with young children, it’s like having to do gymnastics all the time, juggling everything. We live our lives around them.

Sharing home-based childcare before sending the child to full-time childcare is also an option in shared parental care arrangements. For example, after the end of parental leave, Daniel and Margarida decided to care for their prematurely born son at home and only put him in a crèche from age two. Margarida, who is an accountant, used the two hours’ work reduction during the first year of the child’s life and thereafter the continuous six-hour working day to care for the child until 2 p.m. and then went off to work until 8 p.m. Daniel, a policeman, worked an early morning shift until 1 p.m. and then took care of the child in the afternoon while Margarida went to work. Households tasks, including laundry and ironing (usually a female task in Portuguese society3), have always been shared. Both sets of grandparents live in other regions of the country, so there is no daily support. Extensive delegation of care to grandparents is another strategy to manage work and care for young children. In grandparental arrangements, parents rely extensively and on a daily basis on grandparents,

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especially grandmothers, who not only fetch children from the crèche/ school but also care for them until the parents come home. In some cases of long or atypical working hours, they care for them for the whole evening, as in the following care arrangement: 23-year-old Maria, who is married to 33-year-old José, has two jobs: one as a saleswoman (from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.) and another as waitress (from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. and on Saturdays) in her husband’s restaurant. Maria’s parents and parents-inlaw live next door, and they are the family’s main support for childcare. In the morning at 8.30, Maria leaves their one-year-old boy at the crèche, where he has been going since the age of five months. In the afternoon Maria’s mother, who still works, fetches the child at 5 p.m. and takes care of her grandchild until 11 p.m. (she feeds, bathes and puts the child to sleep until Maria arrives, wraps the child in a blanket and takes him home); when Maria’s mother is not available or on Saturdays, it is Maria’s mother-in-law who cares for the child. Maria is pleased and grateful for her mother’s involvement but she is unhappy about the whole care arrangement as she spends so little time with her son. She would prefer to just keep her main job but feels that her husband needs her help in the restaurant:

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I would prefer just to come home, I would go and fetch him at my mother’s and then go home. For me the ideal would be to have a normal life, to come home, make his supper, play a little, give him his bath and put him to bed. But I have to come and help out in the restaurant. Of course he needs my attention. When he is ill, poor child, it is even worse, and then often I just do not go to the restaurant.

Care arrangements combining different types of informal and semi-formal care, as well as full-time formal services, are a fourth type of solution. The multiple delegation arrangement is based on a complex organisation of a wide range of care providers such as grandparents, paid professional or non-professional caregivers (childminders, domestic employees) and formal care. It is frequently used by highly skilled dual-career couples and requires a high level of resources, both financial and in terms of social capital, to manage a large network of caregivers to cope with the care of children and household tasks. The case of Vitória and Afonso, who have three children between the age of five months and four years, is a good example of this complex assortment of informal care, both paid and unpaid, and formal care. Both are highly skilled and committed to their professional careers, and they also have demanding and long working hours. The four-year-old daughter goes to a full-time pre-school while the two youngest stay at home with a domestic employee from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.; four times a week there is also a professional childminder (from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.) and the grandmother participates in the care arrangement on a daily basis by fetching the eldest grandchild from pre-school and staying with the children on the days the childmin-

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der does not come. Moreover, all the caregivers have some flexibility to help out in unexpected situations, and most of the household tasks are carried out by the domestic employee during the week. This complex organisation allows Vitória and Afonso to work long hours with a feeling of reassurance as well as some kind of respite. For both of them, their career is highly significant and they cannot imagine staying at home. I would always work outside the home. There is no doubt about that. Mainly because I really like to work and the work I do. Working is good for me. I think I am always learning things and I need this in order to feel good.

Although careers are never questioned, working and caring at the same time is not an easy situation. Juggling schedules, managing the care arrangement and, above all, finding a balance between both responsibilities and time for parental care is highly stressful, as pointed out by Vitória:

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I feel stressed because I spend less time with the kids and I think I have the obligation and would like to spend more time with them. This is the permanent dilemma I have to face most of the time; my husband too. We try to compensate for this at weekends.

This type of multi-care model is reliable and secure for dual-career parents, and is one in which parents can easily deal with unexpected situations. However, this type of paid informal help is expensive, and most families cannot afford a full-time domestic employee, even if many dual-earner highly skilled couples rely on home help once or twice a week (domestic work paid on an hourly basis). In summary, the care arrangements described above may be seen to reflect recent developments in a wider policy and social context. In contrast to care for elderly people, the benefits of full-time childcare and schooling are not questioned nor considered an ‘option’. The exception is childcare below the age of two, for which a plurality of care arrangements have emerged and where parental time is seen as particularly crucial. Fostered by policies promoting full-time work and services, the scale has turned clearly towards the extensive delegation of care to services and schools, supported by informal care centred on parental sharing as well as regular fringe support provided by a variety of caregivers such as close family or paid childminders.

6 Conclusions Portugal is often described as a country where welfare provision and, more specifically, care services are absent, leading to ‘unsupported familialism’ in which families and intergenerational support take on care

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responsibilities for young children and the elderly. Changes in policy and the societal context over the last three decades have led to a marked shift in the focus and rationale behind care policy. From the mid-1970s onwards, gender equity became part of the policy process and debate. Gradually, the dual-earner family has become the predominant model, and the goal is to facilitate both roles: full-time breadwinner and caregiver. This has brought with it a growing awareness that the position of men and women, in the home and in the labour market, are linked, with the increase in women’s paid work having to be considered in connection with men’s paid and unpaid work. Other factors that have historically and culturally shaped care policies and arrangements over the last three decades are labour market policy (promoting full-time work and advocating short, well-compensated leave and flexibility in work schedules rather than part-time work and long leave); demography, in particular the concern with ageing; the importance of intergenerational obligations; and the emphasis on the expansion of service provision through publicly subsidised third-sector services as well as public and private profit-making services. Caregiving by families continues to be important, and the role of path dependency is apparent in the way family care and intergenerational support are valued and activated. But the process of hybridisation, focusing on family care (rather than female care) supported by different types of leave and services, has led to a specific ‘solidarity’ welfare mix in which the different actors (families, public, private profit and non-profit) make common cause and take on responsibility jointly. Defamilialisation, defined as the capacity of social policies to reduce the reliance of individuals on the family (Esping-Andersen 1999), has been gradual and has taken the shape of a ‘mixed model’ combining family obligations and both public and private services to support families caring for the dependent ones they care about. In such a welfare mix there is, of course, permanent negotiation between the state, the third sector, families and employers, resulting in complex and diversified care arrangements and making the welfare mix heavily dependent on the political factors that promote and implement this negotiation. Work/family policies for childcare and for care for elderly people have, however, followed slightly different paths. Childcare policies have increased both leave and services to support dual-earner families with young children in reconciling work and family life. The provision of childcare services for children and primary schools with full-time opening hours has become the general rule rather than the exception. In contrast, policies concerning care for elderly people developed later, in particular in the 1990s, and defamilialisation is weaker. Providing elderly people with mixed-care arrangements that combine informal, semi-formal and formal care and allowing them to ‘stay at home for as long as possible’ is the preferred path, even if residential care is accepted as an essential care solution for elderly people with high levels of care needs.

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Compared with childcare, however, policy has focused less on caregivers and their need for support in reconciling work and care. The care arrangements described in this chapter illustrate the main care options, both in terms of opportunities and constraints that have emerged along with these trends. Childcare is commonly delegated on a full-time basis (to crèches, childminders, pre-schools, primary schools) and has become accessible and affordable (even if fees in third-sector crèches, paid according to income, often represent a significant amount for average to low-income families). Long working hours nearly always imply some extra juggling between work and care before and after childcare/school, and solutions in this case are more diverse and also socially unequal, since low-income/unskilled workers not only tend to have fewer resources but also work long hours in jobs with less flexible working hours. Family care, mainly grandparents, is highly valued and integrated into care arrangements, but grandparents tend to provide only occasional support. When it is full-time or regular, it is usually for specific periods of time or age groups, mainly when children are below the age of two or, when above this age, in the evening in the interval between 5 p.m. and parents’ arrival from work. Moreover, families often combine different caregivers in order not to become too dependent on grandparental support. In this context of intergenerational support, which varies greatly from one family to another, the gender sharing of parental care between fathers and mothers has become a major variable of the care arrangement: in some cases, care responsibilities are largely taken on by the mother (‘mother-centred’), while in other cases ‘parental sharing’ – connected to the father’s growing involvement in both care and housework – is the crucial variable. In high-income dual-career families, however, the ‘multiple delegation’ arrangement relying on a complex assortment of grandparents as well as paid childminders and home helps is most commonly used for organising the care of young children; this is usually not affordable for low-income families. Hence interviewees agreed strongly on the need for affordable and high-quality formal services from crèches to nurseries with extended opening hours. In contrast, expectations regarding work organisation are lower: due to the fulltime working and gender equality culture, low wages and high unemployment rates, making room for parental time through ‘standard’ rather than part-time working hours was viewed by our sample as the most viable solution. The situation is different when considering care for elderly people. Home-based care is only possible with support from close family members, even when working full-time, and because family caregivers, mainly the person’s children, feel highly responsible for and embedded in the care arrangement. However, even if they still feel it is important to care for their elderly parents, caregivers also advocate state responsibility for care services and stress that the state should support them in this difficult task. As one of our interviewees explains:

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It should be a mix. I think it should be a mix of both family and state. Since during their life people contribute to social security, so they have the right to be supported when they become old. (Pedro, a 48-year-old policeman with two children who provides care for his mother)

Care arrangements for elderly people are therefore diversified, combining home-help services, daycare centres, paid non-professional care and family care, but responding, within the limits of overburden and the demand for quality care, to the preferred norm of keeping the elderly person at home for as long as possible. Given these attitudes to care for elderly people and the fact that the coverage and quality of residential care is modest and often difficult to access, the predominant and most viable type of care arrangement that has emerged in this setting is the ‘mixed’ home-care arrangement described in this chapter: family caregivers take on care, preferably sharing it, and gradually delegate some care to semi-formal or formal services as levels of care needs increase. However, in situations where the person being care for has a very high level of care needs, it is ultimately only high-income families that have the choice between residential care or round-the-clock paid professional and non-professional home-based care. In summary, in this type of ‘solidarity’ welfare mix, dependency on family care has been gradually reduced for all individuals, but the level of choice – in particular in the case of insufficient care for elderly people with high levels of care needs – depends to a great extent on the available resources.

Notes

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1.

2.

The Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Work and Social Solidarity jointly established a national network of shared care/continuity care (Decree-law 101/2006 of 6 June). The objective is to provide various coordinated services according to the level of dependency as well as to meet both medical and social care needs. MTSS 2006 (www.cartasocial.pt). Compared with other European countries, Portugal is in the middle in terms of coverage rates. For instance, the coverage rate for persons aged 65+ in residential homes was 3.4 per cent in Portugal (2006) compared with 0.9 per cent in Poland (2006), 1.9 per cent in the Czech Republic (2008), 3.7 per cent in Germany (2008), 4.6 per cent in Finland (2008), 5.0 per cent in Denmark (2007), 5.9 per cent in Sweden (2008), 6.7 per cent in France (2007) and 6.9 per cent in the Netherlands (2007) (see OECD Health Data, October 2010). For home-based and semihome-based solutions, the coverage rate was 7.6 per cent for Portugal (4.3 per cent for homecare delivery and 3.3 per cent for daycare centres, compared with 3 per cent receiving support in Italy, 0 per cent in Poland, 6.5 per cent in France, 7.0 per cent in Germany, 7.3 per cent in Finland, 9.5 per cent in Denmark, 11.4 per cent in the Czech Republic, 11.7 per cent in Sweden and 12.9 per cent in the Netherlands.

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3.

Gender inequalities in unpaid work have changed more slowly than in paid work in Portugal. The Second European Quality of Life Survey in 2007 shows that Portuguese men have become more involved in childcare tasks than in household tasks, and the weekly number of hours spent by men and women has moved to average European levels: men spend 16 hours per week carrying out childcare duties and seven on housework; women spend 23 hours per week carrying out childcare duties and 17 on housework (Eurofound 2009).

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References Anttonen, A. and Sipila, J. (1996), ‘European social care services: Is it possible to identify models?’, Journal of European Social Policy, 6 (2): 87-100. Crompton, R. (2006), Employment and the Family. The Reconfiguration of Work and Family Life in Contemporary Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Esping-Andersen, G. (1999), Social Foundations of Post-industrial Economies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eurofound (2009), Second European Quality of Life Survey – Overview, European Commission. Evers, A. (1995), ‘Part of the welfare-mix: The third sector as an intermediate area’, Voluntas, 6 (2): 159-182. Finch, J. and Mason, J. (1993), Negotiating Family Responsibilities, London: Routledge. Kamerman, S. and Moss, P. (2010), ‘The politics of parental leave policies – Conclusion’, in S. Kamerman and P. Moss (eds.), The Politics of Parental Leave Policies. Children, Parenting, Gender and the Labour Market, Bristol: Policy Press. Leitner, S. (2003), ‘Varieties of familialism: The caring functions of the family in comparative perspective’, European Societies, 5 (4): 353-375. Lewis, J. (ed.) (1998), Gender, Social Care and Welfare State Restructuring in Europe, Ashgate: Aldershot. Neyer, G. and Andersson, G. (2008) ‘Consequences of family policies on childbearing behavior: Effects or artifacts’, Population and Development Review, 34 (4): 699-724. OECD (2010), OECD Family Database. Retrieved from www.oecd.org/els/social/ family/database. Pfau-Effinger, B. and Geissler, B. (2005), Care and Social Integration in European Societies, Bristol: Policy Press. Pfau-Effinger, B. (2007), ‘Payment for care in the context of new semi-formal forms of care work in European Societies’, Vienna, Paper for presentation at the ESPAnet Conference Social Policy in Europe: Changing Paradigms in an enlarging Europe? Pimentel, L. (2006), A prestação de cuidados a pessoas idosas dependentes: uma análise das relações familiares intergeracionais e de germanidade, PhD Dissertation, Lisbon, ISCTE. Saraceno, C. (2010), ‘Social inequalities in facing old-age dependency: A bi-generational perspective’, Journal of European Social Policy, 20 (1): 32-44.

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Samitca, S. and Wall, K. (2008), Care for old people in Portugal, WOUPS Final Report, Lisbon, Institute of Social Sciences (ICS-UL). São José, J. and Wall, K. (2006), ‘Trabalhar e cuidar de um idoso dependente: problemas e soluções’, Cadernos Sociedade e Trabalho, 7: 119-154. São José, J. (2009), Cuidar de um familiar idoso dependente: trajectórias de cuidar e seus significados, PhD Dissertation, Lisbon, ICS-UL. Torres, A. (2006), ‘Work and family in Portugal’, in G. Rossi (ed.) Reconciling Family and Work: New Challenges for Social Policies in Europe, Milan: F. Angeli. Wall, K. (org.) (2005), Famílias em Portugal, Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. Wall, K. (2007), ‘Leave policy models and the articulation of work and family in Europe’, in P. Moss and K. Wall (eds.), International Review of Leave Policies and Related Research, Employment Relations Research Series, nº 80, London, BERR: 25-43. Available at: www.leavenetwork.org/ Wall, K. (2011), ‘A intervenção do Estado: políticas públicas de família’, in A. Nunes de Almeida (coord.), História da Vida Privada em Portugal. Os Nossos Dias, Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores. Wall, K., Aboim, S., Cunha, V. and Vasconcelos, P. (2001), ‘Families and informal support networks in Portugal: the reproduction of inequality’, Journal of European Social Policy, 11 (3): 213-233. Wall, K. Correia, S.V. and Atalaia, S. (2009), Childcare in Portugal, WOUPS Final Report Lisbon, Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICSUL). Wall, K., Crompton, R. and Lyonnette, C. (2007), ‘Family, gender and work-life articulation: Britain and Portugal compared’, Community, Work and Family, 3: 283-308. Wall, K. and Escobedo, A. (2010), ‘Portugal and Spain: Two pathways in Southern Europe’, in S. Kamerman and P. Moss (eds.), The Politics of Parental Leave Policies. Children, Parenting, Gender and the Labour Market, Bristol: Policy Press. Wall, K. and Leitão, M. (2010), ‘Portugal’, in P. Moss (ed.), International Review of Leave Policies and Research, London, BERR. Available at: www.leavenetwork. org/ Wall, K. and Nunes, C. (2010), ‘Immigration, Welfare and care in Portugal: Mapping the new plurality of female migration trajectories’, Social Policy and Society, 9 (3): 397-408. Wall, K., Aboim, S. and Leitão, M. (2011), Relatório 2010, Observatório das Famílias e das Políticas de Família, Lisbon, ICS-UL.

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7 Blurring boundaries and clashing loyalties Working and caring in Italy Manuela Naldini, Elisabetta Donati and Barbara Da Roit

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1

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the impact of combining care and work on couples with small children and on children who take care of older parents in Italy. This requires a consideration of the ways in which family, work and private and social life are affected by this experience. But it also highlights the fact that, in a context of a highly familialised care system like Italy’s, solutions to reduce the pressures on parents who work (with atypical jobs or working hours) are provided by generations who are soon likely to be in need of care themselves, while at the same time a ‘middle’ generation, still employed in paid work, must split its care between young families with working mothers and frail elderly persons. Our analysis of the work and care balance in Italy therefore focuses on the family, and primarily on the family relationship – that is, the family kinship network and in particular generational relationships in different phases of the life course. We first consider how new work-family balances are based on and shaped by the different forms of generational dependencies and interdependencies. We then look at how the exchange and support of family care, but especially generational exchange and (inter)dependencies, contribute to blurring the boundaries not only between different types of care (formal and informal) but also among different households. From an analytical point of view, two concepts of the family are employed: the first refers to the relationship between family members, regardless of who lives with whom; the second refers to the household – that is, who lives with whom. Two main questions are raised in comparing the similarities and differences in work-care balancing for children and the elderly. How do intergenerational work-care strategies contribute to blurring the boundaries between households? And how do intergenerational work-care arrangements create tensions among different loyalties, as well as between family membership and individual aspirations and choices?

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2 The policy context and the central role of intergenerational ties In Italy, notwithstanding increasing female labour-market participation and population ageing, the ‘strong family ties’ model (Reher 1998) continues to be perceived in the public discourse and in policies as the inexhaustible resource to be tapped when life-course transitions or unexpected crises render an individual or a household vulnerable. Consequently, work-family reconciliation tensions have figured little in the Italian public debate: to some extent, they continue to be regarded as issues for women or, at least, as issues concerning family formation and family enlargement (Naldini & Saraceno 2008). Hence, dilemmas between work and family are still largely relegated to the private sphere, and the tensions between changing lives and resistant institutions (Gerson 2010) and the issues of gender imbalances are not addressed. Yet given the threefold phenomena of an ageing population, an increase in women’s paid work, and new regulations postponing the retirement age, the number of workers aged between 50 and 60 with caregiver commitments is bound to increase in the years to come. Moreover, the growth of care needs also results from the de-standardisation of the labour market, with the diffusion of ‘atypical’ and unstable jobs that especially affects young couples in Italy. Italian families and employment conditions, as well as care practices, have changed dramatically in recent decades, but no recalibration has occurred in the Italian welfare system. Nor have there been changes in Italy’s poorly developed system of policies to support parents or adult children in reconciling care and paid employment. Although Italy has been defined a ‘familialistic’ country (Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999), if one analyses the types and levels of public support for families with children, one discovers that, paradoxically, Italy’s family policies are extraordinarily underdeveloped (Jurado & Naldini 1996; Naldini 2003). Today, Italy has one of the lowest levels of generosity in public funding for families with children. According to the OECD family database, government spending on cash, services and tax breaks on families1 represented 1.4 per cent of GDP in Italy in 2007, much lower than the OECD average of 2.3 per cent (OECD 2011). Facilities for the care of children under three years of age (nidi d’infanzia) have been and still are rather limited: the coverage was 12.7 per cent for children between the ages of zero and two at the national level in 2008 (Istat 2010b). The limited development of childcare services for very young children (under three) explains the heavy dependence of Italian working parents on relatives, mainly grandparents. A survey carried out by Istat-Cnel on working mothers with children below the age of 18 months showed that 60 per cent of these mothers relied on grandparents for the care of their children (Prati, Lo Conte & Talucci 2003). According to the same survey,

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only 12 per cent of interviewees said that they used a public day nursery, while another 10 per cent used a private day nursery. In other words, only 22 per cent of working mothers with children below the age of two used formal care provision. The availability of relatives and grandparents to help with caring and domestic activities, however, does not exist for all families; and such help becomes increasingly difficult to find as more women in younger cohorts enter the labour market. Preschool public services for children aged three to six (scuole per l’infanzia) are well developed, with almost universal national coverage, but they hamper work-family conciliation because they have a school day shorter than the ‘standard’ working day and because, in some regions, pre-schools have no cafeterias. Leave policies in Italy also have a number of shortcomings. Although compulsory maternity leave is quite generous in terms of duration (five months), its replacement rate as a percentage of wages last earned is only 80 per cent. Moreover, the parental leave scheme (law 53/2000) offers a low replacement rate in comparative terms, given that it is only 30 per cent of the wage (for a maximum of six months) and it is paid only if it is taken within three years of the child’s birth. Although the new law introduces a ‘use or lose’ quota for the father, it has not changed the take-up rate by fathers which, according to the above-mentioned survey (2003), is only 7 per cent. By contrast, according to the same survey, the take-up rate of a period of parental leave by working mothers with children below the age of 18 months was high at 76 per cent (Prati, Lo Conte & Talucci 2003). Another shortcoming of this law is that workers with non-standard work contracts, mainly men and women of reproductive age, are excluded from some measures protecting motherhood or supporting conciliation. And even if they are entitled, it is hard for them to use the measures. While childcare policies are rather deficient, policies for older people with care needs can be defined as residual. Public policies in this field have long assumed the family to be the ‘caring’ agency (Saraceno 2003). Weak and fragmented social policies in this sector are coupled with extensive legal responsibilities in supporting relatives (Millar & Warman 1996; Naldini 2003). The supply of residential care services remains limited, given that it covers on average 2 per cent of the population aged 65+ (Istat 2010a) and is rather expensive for end users. One of the consequences of the low availability of institutional care is the marked prevalence of people needing high levels of care living at home. Moreover, home-care services are underdeveloped. They reach 3-4 per cent of the elderly population for a limited number of hours a week, while health care domiciliary services may have a broader audience but tend to be restricted to very specific tasks (Da Roit & Naldini 2010). As early as 1980, the national government introduced a cash allowance – the indennità di accompagnamento (attendance allowance) – for adult disabled peo-

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ple, which was later extended to elderly people. Beneficiaries must be one hundred per cent disabled and in need of constant care.2 In contrast with the above-mentioned social policy limitations, important changes have taken place in long-term care arrangements and in family care practices through the unexpected growth of a private care market based on domestic work and female immigration. At the beginning of the 2000s, a new caregiver profile emerged: that of a migrant woman – commonly called a badante – often working in the grey market and living with the elderly person in need of care. The badante in the Italian policy context provides a type of care work which, in Pfau-Effinger’s terms (2009), can be defined as a ‘semi-formal’ kind of care work. The badante phenomenon has become so widespread, and the need that it covers so visible, that during a regularisation campaign (in 2002, laws no 189 and 222), when thousands of undocumented immigrants were given legal status under specific conditions, care workers were identified as a specific deserving category (Catanzaro & Colombo 2009). As a result of these changes, care provided for old people has remained familialised, with a shift from a ‘family’ to a ‘migrant in the family’ care model (Bettio et al. 2006; Naldini & Saraceno 2008). A comparison of care for the elderly and childcare reveals that the care needs of the elderly are more strongly familialised, both because of the sheer lack of services and because of the priority given to payments for care over the provision of services. Moreover, in Italy the participation of women and senior workers in the labour market lags behind the rest of Europe. In 2008, the employment rate of women between the ages of 55 and 64 – those who are most likely to have an older parent in need of care – was 24 per cent in Italy compared with 68 per cent in Sweden, 46 per cent in Germany, 43 per cent in Portugal, 42 per cent in the Netherlands and 36 per cent in France (Eurostat 2011). However, as in other countries, in Italy a positive trend in the employment of older adults and notably women can be observed and is expected to continue in the future. Yet contrary to the case of childcare, the issue of social rights for elderly people receiving care, as well as for those giving it (mostly women), is still largely ignored in Italy. This also has an impact on the perception of the needs and rights of caregivers. While some attention – though insufficient – is given to the needs of the (working) mothers of young children, no such attention is paid to the needs of workers (and nonworkers) caring for elderly people. Some of the provisions originally aimed at conciliating the employment of mothers of children with special needs within the framework of national legislation on handicap (Law 104/1992) were subsequently extended to the relatives of adults and older people with care needs within the framework of new legislation on ‘maternity and paternity support and access to care’ (Law 53/2000).

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Currently, the main conciliation instrument provided by law is a threeday period of paid leave per month. The relative of an adult assessed as ‘severely handicapped’3 by a medical committee is entitled to the leave, provided that the relative requiring the care does not live in an institution and that the beneficiary is the main caregiver of the handicapped person. Although cohabiting is not a requirement for taking this leave, the beneficiary of paid leave must demonstrate that he/she is providing care on a continuous and exclusive basis.4 In sum, the Italian policy context is of specific interest because social care services and family policies have been far from generous, and because responsibilities for childcare and care for old people have been placed squarely on the family.

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3 Intergenerational and kinship dependencies: Support in terms of care and time between generations over the life course In our analysis of the balance between work and care, in two different phases of the life course, we looked at how households shape or reshape their family relationships, at the different degrees of family dependency, and at how these impact household boundaries. Our sample of parents with young children consists of 26 cases (22 mothers and four fathers), and our sample of adult children caring for elderly parents consists of 27 caregivers (22 women and five men). There are three distinctive features of our interviewees. First, the working parents of young children in our sample have atypical working hours as well as non-permanent work contracts in most cases. Second, the female adult-children caregivers are a highly select group; given the low employment rates of middle-aged women in Italy, there are only few women in the population as a whole who are employed and have elderly parents in need of care. Third, the care receivers at home in most cases require a high level of care, because the number of elderly people with care needs in residential homes in the population as a whole is very small.

3.1 Caring for children: Vertically extended dependency on the family The complex daily care arrangements of most of our respondents had various implications for the quantity and quality of parental and family time. They also had an impact on work and on the personal and social lives of the caregivers. Parents were often at work when the children were at home, which meant that parental and family time did not easily match. More often,

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the mother and the father alternated spending time with the children without the other parent being present. Most families, aside from pre-school and school services, had been obliged to revise their beliefs about what is ‘good for children’ and their household situation. They had to rely closely for the organisation of care and their family’s daily routine on a ‘third person’ – usually a grandparent, but sometimes a formal or semi-formal paid care provider. What emerged from our interviews was that the equilibrium between autonomy and family-work responsibilities as well as the perception of the gap between ideal arrangements and practices are constantly changing. Another conclusion that could be drawn from our analysis was that the solution to these dilemmas does not depend only on one’s own efforts and strategies; it also depends on the life strategies of ‘others’ and on ‘linked lives’ (Elder 1995, 2003). To gain a better understanding of the real meaning of these extended dependencies, it is necessary to consider a wider set of forces that apply pressure on the strategies of working mothers and fathers in breadwinning and caregiving. There were parents in the sample who can be defined as ‘most dependent’ because of the amount of support they receive from the grandparents of their children. We will now examine in detail two separate cases of working women – Paola and Rosa – who both have very young children and for whom informal care was the only (unpaid) resource available. Paola and her husband have a one-year-old baby. She is 36 years old and loves her job as a lawyer. She chose to move into the same apartment building as her parents and her grandparents. ‘I have to say that the family network is essential in my reconciling work with my family commitments’. Although Paola feels tired very often juggling her work and her new life as a mother, her job is a source of self-esteem and personal gratification. Her grandparents are a crucial temporary resource she is utilising to help her become accustomed to the new equilibrium. Although Paola’s workplace supports her mothering, it is her husband, who has standard working hours, who is more involved in everyday family caretaking. A high degree of dependency on family members enables her to achieve a good compromise between intensive parenting and a demanding job. Another ‘most dependent’ case, but one with a completely different history, is Rosa’s care arrangement, which is closely centred on support from her parents-in-law. Rosa is a 31-year-old shelving inspector in a hypermarket. She says she would like to leave her job and devote herself to her three-year-old daughter: ‘If I had to choose, I would prefer to keep my house, my child’. She has no ambitions in regard to her job. She works willingly because the family needs her income, but if she could, she would stay at home. Because her work shifts and schedules are often unpredictable, the pa-

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ternal grandparents are an essential resource for the organisation of Rosa’s family. She describes her husband as very capable in looking after their daughter, but she would prefer him to earn higher wages so that she could quit work. When asked whether she and her husband had decided to have only one child, she answered: Yes, yes, I’ve always said that one is too few, but I’m working and I wouldn’t feel happy about leaving two children for my mother-in-law to look after, because she’s getting old and it could be hard for her to pick them up in the morning to take to school. Having another child would only be possible if I could stay at home.

In Rosa’s case, the strong dependency was associated with a feeling of constraint on her desire to devote more time to her daughter. By contrast, some couples in our sample relied only or mainly on ‘resources internal to the household’. This may be due to individual preference or to lack of other choices, such as when there are no grandparents present. The former situation is illustrated by the account given by Giulia, part of a dual-income couple, who is able to reconcile care and work by using parental shifts as the main care arrangement. Both parents had decided to adapt their working time schedules to their childcare needs. Giulia (35 years old) and her husband are both bus drivers; they have a seven-year-old son, and both work full-time on shifts, weekends included. She was proud of her decision to work on shifts opposite to her husband’s so that they could organise their son’s care by themselves when he was not at school:

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I enjoy my job very much. The only problem is that, by opting for opposite shifts with my husband to take care of Andrea [her son], we cannot be together.

However, there are situations in which Giulia and her husband need the help of their parents and relatives. The main source of informal care is the maternal grandmother, who had looked after the child when he was very young and Giulia was working in a factory. Furthermore, Giulia has a very supportive friend (a former colleague) who lives close by and helps Giulia when her shifts and those of her husband prevent them from reconciling childcare and work. Giulia’s case illustrates that the child’s age and the stage of the family’s life-course are relevant in changing arrangement trajectories from informal care alone, often when the baby is very young, to formal care (plus an informal care combination) when the child reaches school age. Care practices take the form of ‘sharing autonomy’, a configuration in which rigid patterns of male-female differences have been replaced by more fluid boundaries between women’s and men’s roles as caretakers

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and breadwinners. The main critique is the lack of synchronisation of family time. As a consequence of the work schedules of both partners, family time is mainly one parent’s shift-time. The second situation is illustrated by Silvana. She and her husband have to manage their breadwinning and caretaking needs without the support of grandparents as a consequence of unexpected events. Silvana is a post-office clerk, and her husband, a metalworker, often has to work overtime at a factory more than 40 kilometres away from their home. They had recently moved from Genoa to live near her parents (Turin) because her father was suffering from mental illness. They had had to move suddenly, and Silvana felt disoriented because her father’s illness had upset the balance of her family, economically as well as emotionally. Previously, in Genoa, her four-year-old daughter had attended a nursery school that was far from their home, and her grandparent fetched her every day. Her daughter now stays at home with a childminder during the parents’ absence. Financially, she and her husband can barely make ends meet, given the costs of their mortgage, the childminder, their two cars, and her husband’s travel expenses to work. Silvana was burdened by a double responsibility: towards her daughter, and towards her parents, who now needed her help:

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I can deal with my child’s care with more or less difficulty, but I can deal with it, we can plan it. But my father’s sickness is a thing we don’t know, we don’t know how it will develop, we don’t know what kind of help we can get from the public services. If in the future we can’t keep him at home any more, we don’t even know what kind of facility can take him … I don’t like to think about what will happen if my mother can’t look after him any more […] I’m frightened; we are frightened.

Dependency on ‘others’ has many implications and different impacts on equilibrium, on family roles and on intimate family relationships. If dependency on ‘others’ – grandparents, above all – is planned and it works, work-family tensions are managed better. This was mainly the case with those in our sample who had grown-up children and who had ‘negotiated’ with their partners in order to share parental responsibilities (Mariangela, Camilla, Giulia and Luciano), those who could rely on one crucial caring resource, namely their parents (Piera, Cristina and Bianca) and those who had made different care/education choices (Clara, Annamaria and Chiara) with which they were partly satisfied. By contrast, when dependency on ‘others’ does not work because it is not possible or does not correspond to the specific needs of the working couple, or when it is unforeseen, it may become a source of distress and add further responsibilities. This occurs when working parents feel they are in a precarious condition, not only because of their jobs (Ramona and Marta) – their own or their partner’s – but also because the care arrangements are not perceived as suitable or as coherent/compatible

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with their ‘ideal of care’ (Andrea and Maria) and with their image of a ‘good mother’ (Cesira) or a ‘good father’.

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3.2 Caring for old people: Family dependencies in a new welfare mix of care Analysis of public services from the perspective of conciliation between work and care once again demonstrates the extent to which the care of elderly people with extensive care needs is still largely familialised in the Italian welfare mix. As we have seen, the policy responses are fragmented and not homogeneous: the absence of linkage and integration between health and social services and a lack of information oblige caregivers to act alone in an endeavour to devise tailored interventions and to furnish care that is of ‘adequate’ quality. As in other countries, a new paradigm has yet to develop in Italy, and old approaches do not always solve new problems (Briggs 1998). Among the critical points in the functioning of the care-policy system, our respondents emphasised the lack of information about the services available. When domiciliary services were received, the respondents gave them very positive evaluations. But in almost all cases, the professional home service was too limited to provide the continuous care needed by the elderly people. As a result, formal care is always combined with informal care, and very often with semi-formal types of care. Having a badante living in the home ensures that continuous care is provided, that a wide range of tasks are performed, and above all, that the elderly people are supervised at all times. These various arrangements are far from being ‘naturally’ and easily achieved. Having a parent living in the same household represents an excessively constraining situation for almost all the interviewees – even for some of those who had opted for it. Yet the choice of keeping a parent in his/her own home – generally regarded as the optimal situation – requires that the caregivers deal with several responsibilities and dependencies in an evolving and unpredictable care process with very ‘depressing’ consequences for the caregivers. First, the caregivers in the sample have to cope with several loyalties: to the ones they were caring for, to their partners, to their children, to siblings, to the badante – all within the context of a culture that, especially for the main caregiver, applies pressure to furnish care as an obligation (Finch 1989). The working caregivers we interviewed find themselves in a very awkward position: while working and bearing their responsibility towards their own families, they also have to act as need evaluators, case managers, employers and emergency caregivers for their elderly parents. Giovanna recounted how difficult it is for her to assess the real needs of her mother, owing to the specific relation between them:

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As far as I can see she is fine, physically. The problem is that she makes demands and she tries to demonstrate in any possible way that she is right. She is a bit like a child who claims attention. If you don’t check on her, she doesn’t get up in the morning, she doesn’t eat, and she stays all day in her nightdress.

Second, the working caregivers are required to negotiate, coordinate and evaluate informal support, social and health services, paid care and the desires and preferences of their elderly parents (Finch & Mason 1993). It is often the case, for instance, that elderly parents dislike the idea of receiving help from formal services or from paid caregivers: they often do not want ‘strangers’ (or foreigners) in their homes. Rosmara, like other interviewees, has to tell lies to her parents concerning paid workers: The most difficult thing was getting my father to accept a paid carer. According to him, I could have done it all myself.

Third, working caregivers act as employers in the migrant care market. This is not an easy task. Several respondents stressed the contradictions inherent in this care market, which puts the needs and problems of the careworkers, on the one hand, against those of the caretaker and the informal caregiver (the employer) on the other. Paolo’s mother has had a badante for two years. He expressed this contradiction clearly:

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This is the second time in two months that I’ve taken over from the badante … Sometimes they go and simply don’t come back, or they come back one week later than expected … Anybody who works in Italy has almost fifteen days of holiday in the first year and this last badante has already taken four times more, but trying to reason with them is impossible. They have their own families, children ... this one has her own old and frail mother in her country …

Finally, working caregivers function as emergency caregivers. The ring of the telephone at work or at home was the nightmare of many interviewees. The pressure and stress deriving from the specific position occupied by working caregivers in care arrangements are either mitigated or exacerbated by several personal and social characteristics of the interviewees which have to do with their relational sphere (with the elderly person, but also with members of the household and of the family), with employment (type of work and type of employer), with the type and evolution of their parents’ care needs, with their economic circumstances, and with the informal care resources available to them. The timing of care engagements may play a crucial role. This is because the care needs of the elderly develop in such an unforeseen way, and because the care relationship is unexpected or quite unnatural (as

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when children take care of their parents). These circumstances require a greater degree of adaptability than what is demanded of parents upon the birth of a child. Unexpected and strained dependences alter and disrupt the rules regulating family life and may require redefinitions and more abrupt assessments, with the risk of upsetting complex equilibriums.

4 Blurring boundaries in care arrangements The new demands deriving from the labour market and from increasing care needs in a context of meagre public support, as in Italy, make the family the main and often the only caregiving agency. These changes involve the quality of the family relationship, the relationship between caregivers and those being cared for, the providers and the recipients of care, between husband and wife, between parents and children, between adult-children and their elderly parent(s), and among siblings. In a context characterised by high intergenerational dependencies and interdependencies, all these changes to some extent contribute to blurring the boundaries between households, given that the family is the most flexible care arrangement. However, in the cases of childcare and the care of elderly people, help may flow between households in different directions.

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4.1 The older generation as provider of childcare: Visible or blurred boundaries among households? In the care strategies of working parents, the direction of the relationship between generations is mainly vertical. It is usually the older generation that is called upon to help their children in raising their own children, especially if they are working parents with ‘atypical’ working hours. Indeed, among our respondents, the role played by grandparents was even greater than that reported by national studies (Rosina & Sabbadini 2005; ISTAT-CNEL 2003). However, one of the main findings of our research is not simply that a ‘top-down’ generation is at work, but rather that the boundaries between the different types of care and between different households are blurring. In our sample, the most frequent care arrangement (the one prevailing for 15 out of 25 families) is a combination of formal care and informal support. We observed a sort of interdependency between the different types of care and among the various actors involved in providing it. The organisation of formal care – for instance, the use of childcare services – de facto presupposes the availability of informal care. Thus, for Italian ‘atypical’ working parents, this means mixing different types of care and in particular relying on informal care, that is, on grandparents. Only three families use solely formal

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resources. A family poor in time but richer in income can purchase private care and use it in combination with informal and formal public resources (a situation that pertained to only three cases in our sample). How the central role of grandparents affects household boundaries is well illustrated in the cases of Bianca and Enrica, where parents and grandparents lived in the same building or very close to each other. Both the maternal and paternal grandparents are the cornerstones of Bianca’s family and her daily care organisation. She has five children: the oldest is nine years old and the youngest (twins) are four years old. She is a lawyer and self-employed. Bianca is highly optimistic in her outlook on the world, but she acknowledges that it is very difficult to combine a large family with a job. In terms of care arrangements, Bianca had always used public childcare services, both day nurseries and nursery schools, but she could not have chosen her profession without the care support provided by her parents and her parents-in-law. Every day, the oldest children (aged nine and six) have lunch with the paternal grandparents and their father because the school closes at 1 p.m. and has no cafeteria service. Furthermore, every week is characterised by one or more unpredictable events. As Bianca put it, the complexity of the family’s organisation is due to the fact that at least one child might be ill in the morning. The everyday organisation of time and care might follow two different paths:

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In the morning there are those [children] who go to school, and in this case we have our planned times, and there are those who are ill.

It is Bianca’s mother who solves the problem by coming to Bianca’s home to take care of the sick children, while Bianca’s father takes the other(s) to school and collects them in the afternoon. Enrica’s case is a very odd arrangement. A professional nurse, Enrica, has worked only night shifts ever since she separated from her husband, out of economic necessity and in order to spend more time with her two daughters (14 and seven years old) during the day. Hence, every day she leaves home at about 9.30 p.m. to drive her daughters to her husband’s home where he lives with his parents. The daughters sleep with their father and paternal grandparents. At 7 a.m. the grandfather drives the older granddaughter to a crossroads where she catches the bus to school. The younger daughter goes to her school with her mother, who has just returned from work. If the children become ill, their father and his parents are the main care solution. I already worked on shifts and I had to change to night work because my shifts were mostly during the afternoon and my two children were almost always without their mother. Their father used to work all day long and they

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stayed with their paternal grandmother, who was, in my opinion, not able to look after them while they did their homework.

The time that grandparents spend caring for their grandchildren before and after school highlights the ‘time poverty’ of parents when both are working, often in ‘atypical’ jobs. Furthermore, as shown by other studies (Zelizer 1994; Bianchi et al. 2006), one of the main changes in the relationship between parents and children is the ‘intensification of parenthood’, with closer attention paid to children’s needs. Almost all respondents stated that they would like to spend more time with their children, to attend to their needs personally, and to share activities with them. They wanted to get them dressed in the morning, to take them to school, to supervise them while studying, to play with them, and at night to cuddle them and tell them stories until they fell asleep. Grandparents were involved in this care-arrangement solution (Attias-Donfut & Segalen 2001), following childrearing methods and patterns that have become widespread in recent decades with the assertion of children’s rights. Children going in and out of their grandparents’ homes, grandparents going in and out of their grandchildren’s homes, grandparents providing full-time or part-time childcare, a daughter or daughter-in-law organising family care with precise instructions: these are the kinds of intergenerational interactions that are taking place when parents have atypical working hours. Intergenerational care support is unpaid but not costfree for working parents. The involvement of relatives (grandparents but often also uncles and aunts) must constantly be updated and adapted to the children’s age, their stage of development, the children’s and the grandparents’ health, and unforeseen work commitments.

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4.2 Caring for elderly people: Crossing boundaries in the parent’s home In the case of caring for elderly people, the relationship between households affects both dimensions of the familial relationship. The care is mainly provided by the adult children, but it is furnished in the household of the care recipient. The space of care is organised in one place, the elderly parent’s home, which is traversed by many different actors (the caregiver, siblings, the badante, and sometimes home helpers). The most frequent and practical solution among our respondents was the externalisation solution in line with the ‘migrant in the family care model’. In fact, 13 out of 27 respondents resorted to paid migrant caregivers. A second arrangement consists of combining different resources in order to reconcile work and care: we will refer to it as ‘patchworking’. The third option, which is less frequent, consists of cohabitation strategies; and the fourth involves the institutionalisation of the elderly person. The three latter methods of combining work and care can be seen

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as temporary equilibriums in care trajectories and in combining work and care rather than as alternative solutions. Three of the above four models are especially interesting from the point of view of blurring boundaries: patch-working, the migrant in the family arrangement, and cohabitation. Patchworking is the result of combining a wide range of care resources. What is crucial in this model is the ability of the main caregiver to put together a set of actors and coordinate a set of different types of care. The care space is organised in one place – the elderly parent’s home – which is visited by numerous actors, each of whom participates in caregiving with different and diversified tasks, resources, roles and responsibilities at different time of the day, week and year. Giovanna’s mother, for instance, had started having problems after the death of her husband a few years previously. She suffers from loneliness, perhaps depression, and needs to be looked after, even though she is not ‘really dependent’, as her daughter puts it. Giovanna, who works as a primary school teacher, has arranged a set of helpers ranging from neighbours to paid caregivers in addition to the informal support provided by herself and her sister. I usually go there twice a week in the afternoon. I go and stay one hour, an hour and a half. I usually stop by on Saturdays, too, between things that I have to do outside. She has lunch here with us and then I take her back home. Well, actually my sister takes her back home, at around five in the afternoon. This is what happens during the school year. In the summer, when I don’t have to go to school I usually stop by every day. She is lucky because she lives in a place where she knows everybody. There’s a neighbour who keeps an eye on her. For instance in the morning, if she sees that the shutters are still closed, she knocks on the door and goes in. And then there is a [paid] person who goes there twice a week in the afternoon. I thought it was important to give my mother a reference point. In this way, there’s always somebody who spends the afternoon with her: either myself, or this lady, or my sister.

The migrant in the family arrangement – a paid migrant caregiver – also blurs the boundaries between households. Every day, Francesca, a 53-year-old administrative officer who is single and an only child, visits her semi-paralysed mother. She prepares dinner and eats with her almost every evening and goes home at around 9 p.m. In the afternoon, when the paid caregiver has two hours of free time, an elderly aunt who lives in the same district keeps Francesca’s mother company. On Saturdays, the paid worker is off from 1 p.m. until Sunday 7 p.m. Francesca attends to shopping, food preparation, household chores, and body care, spending the entire time with her mother. As she puts it:

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In practice, on Saturday and on Sunday I move into my mother’s.

When a badante is hired, most of the main caregivers in our sample maintain close control over the situation and are largely available timewise. However, the caregiver ‘employer’ sometimes has to knock at the door of her/his parent’s home before entering. This happened when Rosa went to see her parents:

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It has been very difficult. First, even now when I go to them [parents] and I see this person [badante], who is a very reliable carer, I ask permission. I don’t feel that I’m at my parents’ home.

When parents are healthy and independent, the children or grandchildren have to ring before entering their homes; but when one or both of them become dependent in some aspects of their daily lives, the children or grandchildren start to use keys to enter. Some of the caregivers would enter spaces of the parent’s home that had not been previously accessible. According to their role and degree of responsibility, actors enter different rooms: some stay in the dining room to keep the elderly parent company while others take the frail parent to the bathroom or bedroom. The presence of a badante might change this spatial movement, reshaping intimacy with the elderly person and creating a new pattern of family life. Hence the adult children sometimes have to ring the bell before entering as they had done when the parents were independent. Cohabitation arrangements are internalisation strategies that reshape the boundaries between households. In the sample examined, this arrangement did not mean a complete internalisation of care because it sometimes took the form of a bricolage in which care tasks are shared with informal resources or paid caregivers. Valeria, a professional nurse, lives in a small town with her husband and daughter. Her older brothers live a long distance away. When Valeria’s mother fell ill, her husband suggested that she should stay with them. At first, the mother slept on a sofa near her daughter’s bed, but one day she fell to the floor and hurt her knee. She could stand up only with the help of a stick and her condition worsened; she kept to her bed, her mind rarely clear. After a year, she was hospitalised for a month, and when she was discharged, she started living with Valeria’s family. Valeria has obtained domiciliary assistance and a folding bed. At the time of the interview, the situation was stable, but her husband, who intervened during the interview, remarked: ‘it’s like being under house arrest’. The intense traffic in the parental home has many implications for household boundaries. In the case of caring for old people, the blurring of boundaries takes place in more numerous, unstable and multidirectional ways than we saw in the case of childcare. This is not only because the care needs of the elderly are less predictable but also because they are still defined as individual and family problems, with social and profes-

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sional services playing a very marginal role in defining and supporting care needs and in helping with conciliation issues (of caregivers).

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5 Conclusions Focusing on the boundaries between households, the intersections between families and their kinship networks has shed light on the complex dynamic of help flows when one generation has to cope with demanding care needs. Due to a lack of time, Italians tend to mobilise resources belonging to other generations. A private or semi-informal response to general risks and challenges is not a new experience for Italian families, even amid post-industrial changes, but the interdependency that many mothers and fathers and many children are required to manage in order to balance work and care develops in different forms and with different timings. It requires that they deploy new resources that in some respects seem to follow traditional models but in other respects are entirely new. When seeking to combine their different roles and responsibilities, Italian caregivers living in dual-earner couples adopt solutions that result from a complex bricolage of strategies moving across different spaces, across individual and family life-course phases, and through the commitment to working and caring related to traditional or innovative roles. When their children are small, dual-earner parents must cope with an exacting task: they must manage their demanding work conditions, which are highly inflexible, precisely at the point when they feel a high degree of parental responsibility for their children’s well-being. Grandparents are involved to emphasise co-parenting family values, and their presence in daily life does not seem to conflict with parental upbringing models. Dependency exhibits different degrees of flexibility because all the actors are aware that circumstances change over time, and they are ready to adapt to developments. After all, dependency is a temporary condition in childhood. By contrast, dependency may become a permanent state in the last phase of many older people’s lives. Although we are more aware of these ageing processes, it is very difficult to foresee what care needs will arise, and when and how they will do so. Balancing one’s work and one’s care responsibilities was a challenge for the adult children interviewed; however, while quitting work was out of the question, shifting from full-time to part-time was not an easy decision. For children who are also caregivers, work is a given condition; maintaining one’s job is a constant, and it is non-negotiable. Whereas this was more obvious among male respondents, it was surprisingly widespread and strongly affirmed by female interviewees. Engagement in employment was a shared value and to some extent viewed as an ‘alternative’ to care responsibilities.

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Although most interviewees agreed that employers should assume more responsibility for senior workers caring for sick parents, work seems to be a free space different from the home and also recognised by relatives as a sphere that should not be invaded. In this case, precise boundaries seem useful in ensuring a degree of autonomy in adult children’s choices and strategies. Working and caring for an elderly parent was extremely demanding for our respondents, both time-wise and emotionally. Most of them reported high levels of pressure and stress. At the same time, care needs were highly competitive, with demands arising from other spheres of life, primarily their own families. The strategies used to balance work and care in different phases of individual and family life highlight the issue of loyalty, and especially multiple loyalties that may eventually clash. But which factors contribute most to the new clashing loyalties? The majority of Italian women today, as confirmed in this chapter, want to project their futures as pertaining to the worlds of both work and the family, career and motherhood, which requires that circumstances and ways of thinking no longer remain inspired by the male breadwinner family model. The labour market still places strong demands on well-educated and skilled women, requiring them to pursue ‘high fidelity’ careers, whereas many marginal jobs, with low incomes and low job-security conditions, are available to younger cohorts of women. The new labour-market participation of these younger cohorts must be combined with the new model of childhood (and parenthood) amid new gender equality tensions. But in the Italian context, institutional childcare services are still meagre, and the allocation of family work is heavily gender unbalanced. Under a family rhetorical discourse not supported by public policies, young women experience clashes between the impracticability of returning to a domestic setting and the difficulty of pursuing their family projects by remaining in paid work. The heavy reliance on grandparents highlights the ‘time poverty’ of parents when both are working. Yet dependency on the parents expands the amount of resources and options available to resolve the conflict between work and care commitments, and it gives working parents more self-confidence in adapting to changing circumstances. While many of the interviewees, both men and women, adhered to the model that affirms that the mother’s ‘natural’ place is with her children, their everyday actions exhibited a more complex and ambivalent pattern that engaged them in processes of daily negotiation with their partners, colleagues, managers and parents. These actions were sometimes judged to be preferences and sometimes as rational choices or moral options. Among the adult-child caregivers, a clash of loyalties centred on the allocation of time between their families and their elderly parents. Female caregivers who did not have families and were only children re-

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ported a dramatic change in the organisation of their lives brought about by caring for a parent. Among males, being an only child (or having only brothers) seemed to be one of the main reasons for becoming the ‘primary caregiver’. The presence of a badante may reduce the quantity of daily tasks involved in caring for an elderly parent. But at the same time, it may give rise to a conflict between the moral obligations and expectations incumbent on daughters and the delegation of some of these tasks to a third person. In these cases, the main issue is not the lack of free time but the emotional pressure that the care arrangement puts on the caregiver. Adults are willing to go on assuming their multiple responsibilities, but they are not willing to do so on their own. If they are enabled to undertake their various responsibilities with less stress, they will invest in their own well-being. They will have the opportunity to learn from their own experience, better equipped for a lifelong process of ‘active ageing’ (Abburrà & Donati 2008). In this regard, we contend that the conciliation issue in the later stages of working life will become increasingly important and increasingly problematic, not only because of the higher care demands due to the ageing of the population, but also because of the reduced availability of potential unpaid caregivers.

Notes 1.

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2.

3.

4.

Data are from PF1.1.A. Spending is defined as public support exclusively for families (e.g. child payments and allowances, parental leave benefits and childcare support). The measure, which consists of a monthly payment of € 488 (2011), is not means-tested and currently represents the most important public intervention in favour of older people in need of care: it reaches around 10 per cent of people aged 65+, which represents two-thirds of the beneficiaries (Da Roit 2006). A health commission must certify that the person is one hundred per cent disabled. This is also one of the prerequisites for accessing the previously mentioned national attendance allowance (indennita’ di accompagnamento). Furthermore, the caregiver and the person being cared for should live close enough to each other in order to fulfil these requirements. Non-used leave days are lost and cannot be cumulated from one month to another. Monthly permits are fully paid. While on leave, the worker is covered for pension purposes.

References Abburrà, L. and Donati, E. (2008), Nuovi cinquantenni e secondi cinquant’anni. Donne e uomini adulti in transizione verso nuove età, Milano: F. Angeli.

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Albertini, M. and Saraceno, C. (2008), ‘Generational contact and support: The long-term effects of marital instability in Italy’, in Saraceno C. (eds.), Families, Ageing and Social Policy. Intergenerational Solidarity in European Welfare States, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Attias-Donfut, C. and Segalen, M. (eds.), (2001), Siècle des grand-parents, Paris: Editions Autrement. Bettio, F., Simonazzi, A. and Villa, P. (2006), ‘Change in Care Regimes and Female migration: The “Care Drain” in the Mediterranean’, Journal of European Social Policy, 16 (3): 271-285. Bettio, F. and Plantenga, J. (2004), ‘Comparing care regimes in Europe’, Feminist Economics, 10 (1): 85-113. Bianchi, S., Robinson, J. and Milkie, M. (2006), Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Briggs, R. (1998), Caregiving Daughters. Accepting the Role of Caregiver for Elderly Parents, Garland Pub. Catanzaro, R. and Colombo, A. (2009), Badanti & Co. Il lavoro domestico straniero in Italia, Bologna: il Mulino. Da Roit, B., Naldini, M. and Donati E. (2008), Working and caring for an older parent in Italy Report for the WOUPS (workers under pressure) project. Da Roit, B. (2006), ‘Gli assegni di cura in Italia’, in S. Pasquinelli (eds.) Nuovi strumenti di sostegno alle famiglie. Assegni di cura e voucher sociali, Roma: Carocci: 37-62. Da Roit, B. and Castegnaro, C. (2004), Chi cura gli anziani non autosufficienti? Milano: Franco Angeli. Da Roit, B. and Naldini, M. (2010), ‘Should I stay or should I go? Combining work and care for an older parent in Italy’, South European Society & Politics, 15 (4): 531-551. Elder, G. (1995), ‘The life-course paradigm: Social change and Individual development’, in P. Moen, G.H. Elder jr. and K. Luscher (eds.), Examining Lives in Context: Perspectives on the Ecology of Human Development, Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Elder, G.H., Johnson, M.K. and Crosnoe, R. (2003), ‘The emergence and development of life course theory’, in J.T. Mortimer and M.J. Shanahan (eds.), Handbook of Life Course, New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Esping-Andersen, G. (1990), The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, New York: Polity Press. Esping-Andersen, G. (1999), Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eurostat (2011), LFS Statistics, available online at: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/ portal/statistics/search_database Finch, J. (1989), Family Obligations and Social Change, Cambridge: Polity Press. Finch, J. and Mason, J. (1993), Negotiating Family Responsibilities, London: Routledge. Gerson, K. (2010), The Unfinished Revolution. How a Generation is Reshaping Family, Work and Gender in America, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Istat (2010a), L’assistenza residenziale e socio-assistenziale. Anno 2006, Roma, http://www.istat.it/dati/dataset/20100211_00/ Istat (2010b), L’offerta comunale di asili nido e altri servizi socio-educativi per la prima infanzia. Anno scolastico 2008/2009. Statistiche in Breve, Roma, 14

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giugno 2010, disponibile al http://www.istat.it/salastampa/comunicati/ non_calendario/20100614_00/testointegrale20100614.pdf ISTAT-CNEL (2003), Maternità e partecipazione delle donne al mercato del lavoro tra vincoli e strategie di conciliazione, Roma, 2 dicembre 2003, in Atti del convegno, http//www.istat.it Jurado, T. and Naldini, M. (1996), ‘Is the South so different? Italian and Spanish families in comparative perspective’, South European Society & Politics, 1 (3), Winter, London: Frank Cass: 42-66. Millar, J. and Warman, A. (1996), Family Obligations in Europe, London: Family Policy Studies Centre. Moen, P. (ed.) (2003), It’s About Time: Couples and Careers, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Moen, P., Robison, J. and Fields, V. (1994), ‘Women’s work and caregiving roles: A life-course approach’, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 49 (4). Naldini, M. and Donati, E. (2009), Combining Work and Childcare in Italy. Atypical dual-worker family and childcare strategies, Report for the WOUPS (workers under pressure) project. Naldini, M. and Saraceno, C. (2008), ‘Social and family policies in Italy: Not totally frozen but far from structured reforms’, Social Policy & Administration, 42: 733-753. OECD (1994), Caring for Frail Elderly People, New Directions in Care, Social Policy Studies No. 14, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Paris. OECD (1996), Caring for Frail Elderly People, Policies in Evolution, Social Policy Studies No. 19, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Paris. Prati, V., Lo Conte, M. and Talucci, V. (2003), ‘Le strategie di conciliazione e le reti formali e informali di sostegno alle famiglie con figli piccoli’, in Atti del convegno, Roma, 2 dicembre 2003 http //www.istat.it Reher, S.D. (1998), ‘Family ties in Western Europe: Persistent contrast’, Population and Development Review, 24 (2): 203-34. Rosina, A. and Sabbadini, L. (2005) (eds.), Diventare padri in Italia, Roma: Collana Argomenti, Istat. Saraceno, C. (2003), Mutamenti della famiglia e politiche sociali in Italia, Bologna: Il Mulino. Zelizer, V. (1994), Pricing the Priceless Child, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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8 The changing mix of care in six European countries Manuella Naldini, Karin Wall and Blanche Le Bihan

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1

A multidimensional approach to care

Care arrangements have changed significantly in Europe over the last 40 years in the context of shifting gender cultural models, labour markets and welfare systems. While policies introduced immediately after World War II were largely based on a male breadwinner/female home caregiver model, post-1970s policies have emphasised a move away from male breadwinning and an increase in female employment rates and greater state responsibility for working caregivers through leave systems and services. Schemes involving leave to care for the elderly or other family members, early educational services for young children and services/institutions to support elderly persons – even if diverse in structure, intensity and prevalence – are now available in all EU countries. Two issues may be raised regarding the changing nature of care arrangements and how to conceptualise them. The first is whether these changes have shifted away from familialised care arrangements based on unpaid female and informal homecare, thereby reinforcing individual autonomy in relation to the provision of family care as well as gender equity in employment and care work. Welfare state literature and literature on gender and work-family balance reveal complex and often contradictory consequences of these changes. On the one hand, paid leave systems and publicly subsidised services are generally seen to have promoted a trend towards de-familialisation and a decline in male breadwinning/female caregiving, especially in the Nordic countries in the 1980s and early 1990s, by integrating children and dependent persons in care services/institutions and promoting gender equity in care (Leira 1992; Sainsbury 1999). Some of this literature suggests a more or less linear move from a female caregiving model towards a dual earner/dual caregiver model, while other scholars point towards a predominant ‘adaptive’ model in which preferences go towards part-time work or temporary absences from the labour market for certain periods or life stages in order to devote oneself to caregiving (Treas & Widmer 2000; Hakim 2003). On the other hand, the diversity and increasing complexity of current care arrangements and policies have also been highlighted over the last 171

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decade (Geissler & Pfau-Effinger 2005). Rather than a unidirectional linear move, much of the literature on gender and work-family policies has emphasised the emergence of a plurality of care models and spheres of care in which it is difficult to find a clear distinction between familialised/gendered and de-familialised/de-gendered arrangements (Gornick & Meyer 2009). Several authors have highlighted this diversity of models (Pfau-Effinger 1999; Pfau-Effinger & Rostgaard 2011; Aboim 2010) by taking into account the interplay between culture, gender and workfamily variables as well as a variety of pathways and rationales in different welfare systems. The need to consider the complex interconnections between different spheres of care – both public and private, private profit and non-profit, formal and informal – in order to understand diversity in care arrangements has also been emphasised (Daly & Lewis 2000; Bettio & Plantenga 2004; Anttonen et al. 2003). The second issue is whether these trends require new conceptual approaches in order to explore the complexity and pluralisation in current care arrangements. Understandably, conceptualisations based on some well-known dichotomies – such as familialisation/de-familialisation, public/private, generous/weak leave-to-care schemes, formal/informal care – are being critically appraised and unpacked in new ways. Some authors (Korpi 2000; Leitner 2003; Leitner & Lessenich 2007; Saraceno 2010) have stressed that familialisation of care may take on different forms: it may be unsupported, somewhat supported, allowing for choice between home care and services, or strongly focused on service provision. They argue that optional familialism, in which families choose between cash for home care and service provision, has to be distinguished both from supported familialism (some public support for leaves and services) and from de-familialisation, implying a strong move towards the substitution of female unpaid care in the family to paid care outside the family through public, market or third-sector services. Research on leave policy models is saying much the same by underlining distinctions between a specific set of leave-to-care models such as the one-year-leave model focusing on services and gender equity, the optional choice model, the long leave mother-centred model, the part-time work model or the earlyreturn-to-work model (Moss & Wall 2007; Wall & Escobedo 2012). The impact of these different leave schemes is complex. For example, the emergence of longer (poorly compensated) parental leave for home care (lasting two to three years) does not have clear-cut effects: overall, the longer periods of leave do not contribute openly to de-familialisation and gender equity since they are taken up almost exclusively by women, move away from the idea of state-subsidised services and contribute to gender inequality by lowering levels of maternal employment and making it more difficult for women to re-enter the labour market (Morgan & Zippel 2003; Bergman 2009). Female part-time work may also be seen as an option that provides for greater work-family balance while keeping care work and housework in female hands. As some authors have noted,

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part-time work in which the mother is seen as a secondary provider makes it difficult for the mother not to assume her conventionally assigned role of main caregiver in the family (Crompton 1999). Thus, generosity in paid leave schemes and gender egalitarianism do not necessarily move together and have to be analysed as separate rather than complementary aspects of gender equity in employment and care (Gauthier 2002; Ray et al. 2010; Thévenon 2011). The dichotomised concepts of formal and informal care are also being reformulated. Pfau-Effinger and Rostgaard (2011) point out that some forms of care work are neither formal nor informal. These are somewhere in between, involving payment for care carried out in the home but not always provided by professionals or publicly subsidised services. The existence in many countries of a semi-formal care market in which a diversity of care workers (e.g. immigrant women, babysitter services, local childminders) provide paid, often non-professional, regular or occasional care work, clearly does not seem to fit the existing categories of formal versus informal care work and subsidised-professional versus unpaid family care. This has led to a distinction between formal and semiformal spheres of care, with the latter including forms of paid care work carried out in the home (Pfau-Effinger, Flaquer & Jensen 2009). Lastly, welfare state literature and research on family support networks are also pointing to the blurring of boundaries in welfare regimes: the rise in a varied mix of care which includes a plurality of care providers, from public services to private profit and subsidised third-sector services and unpaid and paid informal caregivers; the complementarity between family/extended kin care and state subsidised services, between public and publicly subsidised care work, between local and nationally provided public support for families (Albertini & Saraceno 2008; AttiasDonfut et al. 2005). The concept of ‘welfare mix’, although developed in approaches that did not initially deal with the issue of care, is being explored to account for some of these developments in care work (Evers 2005; Pfau-Effinger & Rostgaard 2011). These two issues point to a third challenge which is taken up in this chapter. If the nature of care arrangements is changing and moving in the direction of a new mix of care work and care providers, then it is important to understand whether these changes are resulting in a mix of care arrangements not only across countries but also within national contexts of work, care and welfare. Drawing on some fundamental aspects of care arrangements in the six European countries, both at the level of policies and practices, we will seek to explore this issue. Two questions are of particular significance. First, how do caregivers cope with the work-care package in the six countries we studied? Can caregivers with long (at least full-time) or atypical working hours rely only on formal services or can we identify a strong trend towards a mix of formal, semi-formal and informal care arrangements? Does this trend cut across all countries? And how do caregivers who work long or atypi-

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cal hours themselves perceive and practise this emerging mix of care? Secondly, does the mix of care take on similar or different forms in the case of care for young children and care for dependent elderly persons?

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2 The welfare mix in care arrangements for children Parents with young children in the six countries analysed in this book rely for childcare on a variable combination of formal services (crèche, nursery school, pre-school services, school, after-school services), semiformal (childminder, nanny, babysitter) and informal resources (mainly grandparents, other relatives, friends). The particular combination of these resources – the mix in services (and the ‘intensity’ of the services) and the specific care practices at the individual and family levels – is, of course, shaped by various factors: parental division of paid and unpaid work (parents’ working schedules, types of shift work and overtime, the sharing of parental care), the age and number of children, and the availability of formal, semi-formal and informal resources. At the macrolevel, the specific combination is shaped not only by the differences in the welfare mix regarding types of institutions and actors (public/private/third sector) but also by the normative context, in particular cultural norms relating to the most appropriate type of care for children, as well as norms related to female employment, motherhood, fatherhood and the gender division of care. However, the main specificity of the parents studied by WOUPS is that they distinguish themselves as individuals and families that are ‘under pressure’, for two main reasons: first, both parents (or one in the case of single parents) have a full-time job that needs to be combined with care; and second, the interviewed parent or his/her partner, or both, has a job with non-standard working hours (including long hours) or a non-standard working contract. In the following paragraphs we will therefore focus on how these dual-earner parents with long or atypical working hours reconcile work and care within the framework of the changing welfare mix.

2.1 Formal care: A crucial resource but not flexible enough As we have seen in chapter 1, the coverage and types of childcare facilities available for children – especially for very young children below the age of six – as well as the opening hours of services may vary substantially in the six countries analysed. For school-age children, schools that only open in the morning or without cafeteria services leave parents with a number of problems when they have to combine work and care, thus requiring them to mobilise other resources. However, even if the coverage of public services is quite high and diversified, and even if the length of hours of school is quite long and flexible, as in the case of Sweden,

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France and Portugal, opening hours are not always flexible enough to match the working hours of parents who work long and ‘atypical’ hours. In Sweden, for instance, after the first year of the child’s life, which is generally handled by parents during parental leave, almost all parents rely on public childcare and after-school services (managed directly by parents or publicly subsidised services) for children up to the age of ten. In this part of Europe, schools offer pre- and post-school hours services. There are also a few services, managed independently, for parents who work at night, which are open 24 hours and where the children can stop over to sleep. Overall, this diversity makes for services that are quite extensive and helpful for parents who have diversified needs and long working hours. However, this does not mean that many parents with long or atypical working hours do not need to build in other, more flexible care providers to supplement service provision. For example, the most difficult work-care reconciliation problems were found among lone parents who work in the evening, or among parents with unpredictable long working hours who have to depend on other childcare providers such as grandparents, siblings or friends. Almost all French parents with pre-school and school children use some type of public service, but the lack of flexibility in the opening hours of childcare services and the lack of pre-/post-school facilities sometimes makes it difficult for parents with atypical and long working hours to take advantage of them. The child’s ‘day off’ school also gives rise to a need to bring in other informal or formal care providers. Among French parents with very young children (under the age of three), care arrangement strategies frequently include other more flexible services, such as the assistante maternelle, or private childminder. The private childminder is considered an ‘ideal solution’ by several parents. But it is not an option that is available to everyone, not only because it is expensive but also because not all childminders are available to work at night, very early in the morning or during holidays. For example, Anne and Patrick have two children, aged six and three. They live in Paris, and both have atypical working hours. Patrick works evening, night-time and weekend shifts on the railways. Anne works as a hairdresser: some days she stays at work until 7 p.m., and she works all day Saturday. On days when Anne finishes at 7 p.m. and Patrick is not at home, their babysitter picks up the youngest child from the nursery (at 4:30 p.m.) and stays at home until one of the two parents arrives. The babysitter is also needed on Saturdays if Patrick is working a Saturday shift. The grandparents are only involved in case of emergency. As Patrick says, it is not at all easy to arrive at a flexible solution, that is to say finding someone who is available to fit in with a railwayman’s shifts and a hairdresser’s working hours. Having someone at home while the parents are at work would be an ideal solution. Christian, a French technical assistant in an engineering company, has two children aged seven and one:

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The ideal would be to have someone at home who would fetch the children from school and who would look after a bit of everything.

Rozenna, who works in a bookshop and has a five-year-old daughter, explains how the ideal choice is not always what you can afford:

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I would really like to have a babysitter for when the kids come home from school. But to be honest, from a financial point of view I just can’t do it.

In Portugal, most parents with pre-school or school-age children also use full-time, public or publicly subsidised schools that have canteens and pre- and post-school services (the latter paid for by the families who need them). Parents who work full-time are therefore able to reconcile work and care on the basis of formal care, but they usually combine this with some informal support and/or ‘shift’ parenting, not only to bring and fetch children but also to avoid leaving them in school for more than eight hours. Below the age of three, care arrangements are more diverse, as in France, and cultural norms – although more favourable to crèches than in the past due to the expansion in full-time childcare services over the last decade – often highlight the advantages of grandparental or childminder care. Private childminders, as in other countries, are only affordable for families with higher incomes, so they also emerge as an extra care option in highly skilled dual-career couples and become part of a wide network of flexible care provision that includes a mix of formal, semi-formal and informal caregivers. The particular care mix therefore varies. Maria, who works as a waitress in a restaurant until late, has her child in a full-time crèche and then relies on her mother and her mother-in-law to fetch the child and care for him in the evening until she arrives; while Vitória, who is part of a high-income, dual-career couple, has a wide network of caregivers after school hours, which includes grandparents as well as a domestic employee and childminders. In Germany, pre-school and school hours may often be part-time, leading both standard parents working full-time or with long or atypical hours to search for a variety of care solutions in order to reconcile work and care. In the Netherlands, Rita has two part-time jobs, her husband works full-time, and she has four small children (aged seven months, three, five and seven). The care arrangement uses both formal and informal options. She thus sends two of her children to a childcare centre for a few days, one of them also to a host mother, and two of them to school and then after-school care. She also calls the grandmothers or a nanny to stand in when needed. In summary, when it is not possible to adapt working time to the opening hours of services, as often happens in the Swedish case, or when public childcare services for children under the age of three are not always available, as in the Italian, French or Portuguese cases, or are only available part-time, as Germany, parents who work long or atypical

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hours rely on two main options: combining both informal/semi-formal care and formal care/school or, when children are below the age of three, replacing formal care with informal or semi-formal care.

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2.2 Mixing formal, informal and semi-formal care: Grandparents, childminders and others? As shown by quantitative surveys (Attias-Donfus et al. 2005; Blome et al. 2009), the extended family network, particularly grandparents, is a crucial resource for combining childcare and work (especially in the case of young children) in the national contexts we examined. In all countries included in the qualitative study, grandparents sometimes or regularly play a pivotal role in taking care of the grandchildren while parents work: at night, early in the morning, in the evening, on Wednesdays (in France), over the weekend and during summer holidays. Grandparents play a pivotal role not only in providing substitution time in relation to parental care or childcare services but also because, even if formal services are available, the availability of family and informal resources seems to be crucial for the smoothness of care arrangements: not only to cope with emergencies or holiday time but also when parental working hours do not match service times. Thus the organisation of formal care in fact assumes that informal or semi-formal care is also available. However, the extent to which informal resources are used, as shown in the quantitative study by Blome et al. (2009), varies widely from one country to another, both in relation to proximity and the amount of time spent with grandchildren and in relation to family culture and, of course, the availability of other formal or semi-informal resources. The interviews show that the role of grandparents as a major resource for reconciling time for care and time for work is particularly crucial in the Italian case, for all types of families. Moreover, it often takes the form not of co-residence but of residential proximity. For some of the Italian families, the decision to live close to one’s own parents was a planned strategy decided before childbirth or soon after. This is the case for Paola, a lawyer, who decided to move into the same building as her parents and grandparents. Paola and her husband have a one-year-old baby. She loves her job, although she is aware that striking a balance between career and family is not easy. In Paola’s case, her mother takes care of the baby when she is at work until her husband comes home at 6 p.m. She is convinced that it is possible to reconcile a highly demanding job with being a mother if two pre-conditions are met: having a family network, as she has, and having a husband who shares the work of caregiving, as she also has. According to the interviewees, the most appropriate childcare for a baby in Italy, after mother care, is that provided by the family environment.

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In the Netherlands, although social policy tends to emphasise the importance of ‘parental sharing’ (not always achieved in practice, cf. Kremer 2007;), grandparents are also a crucial resource and a care arrangement strategy that seems to meet the ‘ideal of care’ of several families. This is the case of Femke, divorced after a short marriage and an assistant manager in a small shop, who has two children (aged nine and 14). Femke’s parents play a vital role in the reconciliation of work and care. They are both retired and take care of the children during lunchtime and after school, when Femke is working. Femke’s parents offered to help her when she started working again (after a period of being on welfare since the divorce). They said that if she needed childcare, they would want to help out. She decided to accept that help when she obtained a new, full-time job. Although after-school services are available and children can stay at school during lunchtime, Femke believes it is best to think of a solution that does not involve formal childcare: I always wanted to solve these things myself … First, it is much cheaper financially, and secondly I think it is better for children to be cared for in their own environment. Of course, a childcare institution can be a lot of fun, but I think that when you can solve it yourself … [you should].

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Parents in the German sample also make considerable use of grandparents. But several mothers saw this solution not as a choice but rather as a last resort because they had no alternatives. This is the case of Gabriele, whose mother in-law had already taken care of the first child up to the age of four, because at that time it was very hard to find a place in a childcare centre. Gabriele is now again in the position of having to ask her mother-in-law to help with the second child by caring for him during lunchtimes, because the school does not provide a cafeteria. Gabriele explains her situation: My mother-in-law has several health issues, there’s a reason why she’s already on a pension at 55, you know. She got one illness after another […] and if I had a choice I would rather look for someone else. Not that I don’t think she is capable, it’s just because of her health issues, and I don’t want to add to the burden. Taking care of the kids all day is not easy.

Thus the informal network, and especially grandparents, are an essential pillar of most care arrangements in Germany, too, but parents here are more likely than those in Italy, France, Sweden, Portugal and the Netherlands to say they use grandparents, not so much because they see them as a better solution but for the lack of alternatives. In Sweden, a mix of formal and informal care is also the main form of care arrangement. In many Swedish families, if grandparents live nearby and are still healthy, they are often also involved in caring for their grandchildren. A common arrangement is weekly help. But unlike some

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other countries, in Sweden, grandparents are used mainly as a backup solution when parents are unable to rearrange their own working hours or when the grandchildren are ill or during the holidays so that the parents do not need to lose working days. In addition to the support of grandparents, interviewees in high-level professional positions often manage to remain continuously employed full-time thanks to the help of childminders. This is a type of care included in the care arrangements of some of the Italian and Portuguese interviewees with high professional qualifications and long working hours. Some cases are also found in Germany, where publicly funded and temporarily flexible childminders are part of the new family-oriented policy targeted at university-educated mothers of children under the age of three, and France, which has assistante maternelle services. In both cases, rather than informal care we have a new, ‘semi-formal’ care arrangement. Use of semi-formal care depends very much on parents’ financial circumstances and on the extent to which they are subsidised by the state. Even when they are subsidised, the opportunity cost to use a paid informal caregiver depends greatly on individual and family income. In Italy, for instance, only (or mainly) highly skilled parents who work long hours, who are away from home for long periods, who often travel for work, or who have high family incomes can afford to hire a childminder. In Portugal, it is also necessary to earn a high income in order to be able to afford a full-time or part-time paid childminder or nanny. Finally, in all countries, parents’ siblings and friends are not as involved in care arrangements as grandparents are. They are used very rarely, and only on special occasions. Olivia, an assistant nurse and single mother in Sweden who works shifts and who is divorced and remarried, differs from this pattern by being very dependent on her sister and friends for the care of her two children (aged ten and 22). She also receives help from her second husband (who is living apart), but not from the father of the children. She says she cannot afford to pay a childminder. In summary, in all six countries, parents who work full-time and have long or atypical hours tend not to rely on just a single resource but to mix a variety of care arrangements by combining formal, semi-formal and informal resources. An example of a very complex care arrangement is that of Mathilde and Claude in France, who are both contract workers in the entertainment industry (she is a sound engineer and he is a comedian). They have two daughters aged 12 and nine. Claude is regularly away for long periods. Mathilde works only around ten days a month, but during that time she is also away. The care arrangement is based on three main resources: school, Mathilde’s mother, who stays with the two daughters regularly, and a network of babysitters. Mathilde calls them each time she has to leave for several days. The main difficulty is that she is told when she has go away only two or three days ahead of time.

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Planning ahead for care is therefore difficult. Nevertheless, the care arrangement is stable because she has an extensive and reliable network of babysitters.

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2.3 Combining childcare and work in a context of non-standard work Some of the changes that have taken place in the labour market in recent decennia (see Chapter 1) seem to make everyday life experienced by the interviewed parents quite similar. Although care arrangements are highly heterogeneous between and within national contexts, there are three common elements that characterise the care experience of parents who work long and ‘atypical’ hours. The first common element is the need to integrate formal, semi-formal and informal help. Parents who work ‘atypical’ or long hours fulltime find it more difficult to use only formal services, even in the case of children who attend compulsory school. As we have seen, they often need a mix of care arrangements that can replace or supplement formal care solutions. This requires a complex task of juggling care and work times, e.g. between children who are brought to school by grandparents and picked up by the available parent. In other words, in the case of parents with ‘atypical’ or long hours, the organisation of formal care in fact assumes that informal or semi-formal care is available. At the same time, the timing and intensity of informal and semi-formal care and the need to expand the range of care providers are to a large degree dictated by the opening hours and availability of formal care. The interdependence of different types of care is even more crucial when the parents have more than one child. The second common element is the complexity and instability of the organisation of daily life as a result of the mix of formal, semi-formal and informal care, due both to the age of the children and the unpredictability of working hours and parents’ career paths and the preferences and emotional needs of the children. It is not only a question of bringing in and organising a wide range of caregivers but also ensuring the wellbeing of the child and the main caregivers. Possibly more than for parents with ‘standard’ or shorter working hours, it is necessary for the actors involved in a mix of care arrangements to experience and rely on a fluid type of collaboration that pays attention to relational needs. For example, it is important that the different people involved in the care network do not perceive themselves as objects, and that children do not feel treated as ‘mail packages’. In care practice, this means that one of the two parents, generally the mother, acts as ‘care manager’ in order to mobilise the different actors and to re-organise care and different times of care. The number of actors involved in the care arrangement network and their diversification requires time and energy. Grandparent and childminder time and the relationship with childcare services and school

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need to be planned and organised in order to make them fit with the needs of the family and the children, which can vary from day to day or week to week. A third common element is the use of a complementary strategy for combining care and work, one we may call a ‘shift parenting system’ in which parents adjust their working hours so that one of the parents can be with the children or adapt his or her working hours to childcare needs. This care solution can be seen as a development of the new parental attitude towards spending more time with children as a model of ‘good parenthood’, a trend that also emerges from many other recent studies (Bianchi, Robinson & Milke 2006; Coltrane 2009). This strategy is found to varying degrees in every national context, since it requires a well-developed ‘equal parental sharing’ model, that is, one in which the father is highly involved in parental care. Of course, sometimes this care strategy has a strong impact on the synchronisation of family time and may thus have negative effects on family time, but in other cases it can be perceived as having a positive effect on child development and wellbeing. This is the case of Patrick and Anne (train driver and hairdresser respectively). During the interview, which was carried out with both of them, they saw non-standard working hours as being positive for the children: Patrick: There is a main advantage when you work non-standard hours. I can go and fetch them every day after school at 4:30 p.m. and sometimes even at midday for lunch. They can have lunch at home. And this gives them a real quality of life.

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Anne: They don’t always have us together, but they always have one of us.

In Italy, parental shifts are used, for instance by Giulia and her husband, who are both bus drivers. They have a son aged seven, both work fulltime in shifts, weekends included. Giulia previously worked in a factory, but since the child’s third birthday she has worked as a bus driver in shifts opposite to those of her husband. She is proud of this work arrangement because they can organise their son’s care by themselves when he is not at school. However, Giulia feels that working on weekends is very hard, because she and her family have no time to spend together. Parental shifting is quite widespread among the Swedish respondents. However, in this case this strategy can actually create atypical working hours, as when parents want to minimise the time children spend in public childcare institutions. For instance, Britta and her husband are white-collar workers in the engineering sector. Most of the time they are able to choose their working hours, so they have chosen to take turns working and caring, and they take turns working the early shift (6:45 a.m. to 3 p.m.) and the late shift (8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.). In this

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way they can both work full-time, and the time their children spend in public childcare is limited to seven hours (8 a.m. to 3 p.m).

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3 The welfare mix in care arrangements for the elderly Although there are significant differences in terms of caring policies and of care practices overall, several common experiences emerge from the qualitative analysis of the strategies used by our sample of adult children to combine work and care for their elderly parents in need of support. In all countries, the combination of care and paid work for family caregivers is possible only thanks to a composite set of resources – formal, semi-formal and informal, professional and non-professional, paid and unpaid, public and private, involving many providers and co-providers of care. Each national dataset shows a combination of different resources in addition to the family caregiver, mainly daughters in this study but also some daughters-in-law and sons, who cannot bear the full burden of the care alone. A house-cleaner, a paid care worker, professional or otherwise, a nurse, a sibling, a friend or a neighbour who delivers informal care, home help, a daycare centre: all of these are used in the different countries to organise the old person’s home-based care. They constitute a veritable mosaic of various care providers according to the needs of the old person, the availability of the informal caregiver network, existing public or private professional support and the ‘ideal’ of care in the different countries. This general trend, which is linked to the diversification of policy measures related to the needs of elderly people and their families, cannot be considered solely a way of reducing the existing gaps in care services in the different national contexts. It also corresponds to the definition of a common portfolio of measures to meet the various needs of families. There are three major trends of change in elderly care arrangements in the six countries: 1) the outsourcing of (part of) the care tasks is a major characteristic of care arrangements as well as the involvement of informal family caregivers, even in countries where the public care system is important; 2) the shift towards the care arrangement as a complex mix of resources is also marked by the development of semi-formal care or new hybrid patterns of care work (Geissler & Pfau-Effinger 2005), which has different characteristics in the six countries; and 3) the changing role of the family caregiver, who has to invest in the management of care, is another major trend.

3.1 Relying on the family and the outsourcing of care tasks Though our study confirms the emphasis on formal services for the elderly in the Netherlands and in Sweden, which are traditional service-led model countries, it shows that externalisation of the care tasks outside

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the household and even outside the family network is also a main feature of the care arrangements in the other countries. In our sample, there are some care arrangements in which only family caregivers are involved in three of the countries studied: Italy, Portugal and Germany. Yet these types of care arrangements remain limited in each of these countries, and the delegation of care tasks and the recourse to paid care workers outside the family and even to professional services is significant in all the samples studied. The role of the informal (unpaid) family caregiver can be seen to be shaped by three factors. First, it depends on the different legal and social definitions of dependency levels and the degree of public acknowledgment and availability of formal resources. Second, it is related to the more general social norms and attitudes towards family obligations, especially between generations. Finally, it depends on the social legitimacy assigned to professional care providers and to care support provided outside the family, by a professional or non-professional paid caregiver either at home or in a daycare centre or similar type of institution. In the Italian sample, where family obligations remain strong and where public support is insufficient, the care arrangements based only on the main caregiver and his/her family network occur only in the first phase of care, when the dependency is still manageable, when the elderly person in need of care has not yet been recognised as being one hundred per cent disabled (which is a pre-requisite for claiming the attendance allowance), when the caregiver is able to mobilise the network, and finally when the person being cared for and the caregiver live in the same household. Thus, in the majority of the cases studied, the family caregiver combining work and care is not alone: there is an external paid care worker (professional or not) who takes on most of the care tasks. Portugal is an intermediate position. Although it recognises two different levels of dependency needs and has increased its formal care provision for the elderly over the last three decades (daycare centres, homebased care and home institutions), family obligations to care and to keep the elderly person in his/her own home for as long as possible are also very strong. In Portugal it is therefore not exceptional to find some care arrangements in which the main caregiver takes on caregiving alone, with no formal or semi-formal support of any kind. As illustrated in the chapter on Portugal, this is more likely to happen in situations of low dependency and when the elderly person lives in the same household as the family caregiver, usually with a single or divorced daughter or son. However, it can occasionally happen in cases of high dependency in families with several co-resident caregivers (spouses as well as daughters and/or sons). The situation then becomes a significant burden. Claudia: We help each other a lot [Claudia, her brother and their father live with the elderly mother with care needs], but it is my father who does most of the job. During the day he cares for her [his wife, Claudia’s mother], he

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takes her to the bathroom and this happens six, seven or eight times a day. So he does most of it during the day. So at weekends I avoid going out in order to relieve him. When I am at home my father never cares for her, it is my brother and me. We do this to relieve my father so that he can have a quieter weekend … Yes, now my life is really very limited.

As policy measures have increasingly moved towards the provision of services, norms and practices have been shifting towards a mixed-care regime. According to the interviewees, family care supplemented by professional services (daycare centres and home help) which allow the person to live at home is seen as the ideal solution in situations of low to medium dependency, while institutional homes or full-time semi-formal care are seen as the most suitable options in cases of severe dependency. In the German sample, there are also some care arrangements in which only informal family caregivers are involved. However, unlike the Portuguese case, this only occurs when the level of dependency is low and the main caregiver is never alone, meaning that other family members are involved in providing care. However, the reasons for not using services also have to do with the fact that the main caregivers do not want strangers around or have had a bad experience in the past. This is the case with Nora, aged 42, who cares for her mother in her own home. She works full-time, as does her husband. The care work is provided by the nuclear family. Nora and her husband share the care work, and their son also helps. Asked by the interviewer why she has not engaged any service, Nora answered:

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Because we are sufficient people and we could do that, and because we do not want to have a care service here. My mother does not want a stranger in the house.

Conversely, care arrangements in Sweden and in the Netherlands also involve family caregivers. Moreover, in both countries, the state’s inability to cover all family needs has led public authorities to extend the role of the family caregiver. Together with Sweden, the Netherlands is where a well-developed formal care system for elderly people with care needs has existed for a long time. In fact, in the majority of cases in the Dutch sample, the care provided by the main family caregiver, whether unpaid or paid (by the personal budget or PGB scheme), is coupled with that provided by professional care workers. Professional care in various forms – home help, personal and health home care, daycare centres, nursing homes and care homes – embodies a substantial part of the overall care arrangement in almost all Dutch cases, confirming the importance of established long-term care policies in this country. This mix of informal and professional care requires that the main family caregivers (and other informal caregivers) and professional services

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reach agreement on what has to be done and on the timing and scheduling of each intervention. For instance, one of our interviewees [Catelijne, the Netherlands] cares for her mother two days per week, from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Her brother takes care of the mother one day a week, and on other days her mother is cared for by at least ten different home care workers, who together intervene seven times a day. She talks about the constant need to manage the care arrangement as follows:

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I coordinate the professional home care workers. If I do not contact them regularly, their attention weakens. I consciously plan these contacts. I can imagine that they are less alert sometimes, they have more people to care for … By contacting them I also show my appreciation for their work. It is care work, and they perform a major task which is not always properly valued. It is so important what they do.

In France, where family caregivers have traditionally been a part of care arrangements, the introduction of a cash allowance at the end of the 1990s led to the outsourcing of some care tasks. In the French sample, in no case is the burden of care supported entirely by the sole family caregiver. Professional paid caregivers are always present, delivering only a few hours of care in situations of low dependency and up to 57 hours per week, as in the case of Josiane, who lives with her elderly mother. The latter is suffering from dementia and needs to be watched over all day long. Though the 57 hours per week are not all covered by the cash allowance, Josiane has to rely on professional services to care for her mother while she is at work. This common process of the outsourcing of care is strongly linked to the development of various policy measures to meet the needs of elderly people with care needs in the different countries. Home-based services have been introduced as well as cash-for-care schemes to support families in the organisation of their everyday care arrangements. Cash transfers to families and the fact that their use is not regulated, as in Germany and Italy, have opened up the possibility of paying non-professional caregivers outside the family or a family member (as in Sweden, the Netherlands and partly in Germany), thereby promoting new hybrid forms of paid care work. This confirms the idea suggested by Ungerson (2005a, 2005b) and Geissler and Pfau-Effinger (2005) of a blurring of boundaries between the usual categories of care – informal and formal, paid and unpaid – which was also underlined in our analysis of childcare. In all the countries surveyed, care arrangements emerge as a complex mix of resources.

3.2 The development of semi-formal care The qualitative analysis of the care arrangements of our respondents shows that although recruitment of a professional or non-professional

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paid worker is a common solution, the process of outsourcing differs greatly between countries, with variations in the balance between formal, informal and semi-formal care resources. While in our French, Dutch and Swedish samples, paid professionals or similar workers are recruited on a legal basis, this is not true for Italy, where a grey care market has emerged. Italy stands out from our six countries in having the most instances of outsourcing of care to privately paid migrant caregivers. In general, the caregiving migrant worker – called badante in Italian, which means attender – takes care of the older person and performs household tasks on a 24-hour basis, six or seven days a week. In general, the interviewees report the duties of the badanti as ‘doing a bit of everything’ and ‘being there’. Paid care workers have quite flexible hours, usually adjusted according to the main caregiver’s work timetable and to his or her family commitments, and to the availability and use of other informal resources. Chiara and her siblings, for instance, usually take over from the paid care worker on weekends, but they can also negotiate with the paid caregiver to stay over the weekend:

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She [the badante] lives there with her. And we, the children, the daughters – to tell the truth … we step in during the weekend, to take over from the badante. Saturdays and Sundays, it also depends on our own commitments. But we tend to let her take Saturdays and Sundays off entirely.

This emergence of a grey market is also a characteristic of the German and Portuguese national contexts. Yet the situation differs greatly from the Italian case. Unlike Italy, where the ‘migrant in the family’ model is widespread, in Portugal, full-time semi-formal or private paid professional caregivers are only affordable for high-income families, and only a minority of families can afford to hire a full-time non-professional (national or non-national) or a paid professional to care for an elderly person with high care needs at home (Wall & Nunes 2010). In Germany, where informal paid caregivers, often coming from Eastern European countries, are also widespread (Kondratowitz 2005), in several cases informal paid workers are included in the overall care package. Their presence varies from a few hours once a week to a substantial number of hours every day. But unlike the Italian case, none of these migrant caregivers seem to be living with the old person (Keck, Saraceno & Hessel 2009). Strangely enough, the increasing incidence of semi-formal types of care occurs not only in countries where care has traditionally been provided mainly or exclusively by the family but also in countries which until the 1990s had served as good examples of the de-familialisation of care. This is the case in Sweden, where in recent decades the number of services for the elderly has been substantially reduced, and there is in-

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creasingly the expectation that needs will be met by families and/or through the market. However, it is primarily family support that has increased since 2000 (Szebehely & Trydgegård 2007). According to the national guidelines as expressed in the Social Services Act of 1992, social welfare committees are required to assist family members who take care of the elderly. A national Incentive Grant has been available for municipalities for several years to assist family members and people with care needs in developing forms of support. Family members who provide care can obtain a family caregiver grant paid either directly to the caregiver or to the person being cared for, who then pays the caregiver. So even in Sweden there is an observable increase in the mix of formal, semi-formal and informal care, especially in the case of parents who need the most help. For instance, Diana defines herself as the main caregiver of her mother, who suffers from dementia. The mother goes to a special daycare facility for people with dementia every weekday. During the evenings, nights, mornings and weekends, Diana is responsible for the care. She worries constantly when she knows her mother is alone. She lives 45 minutes by car from her mother, so it is quite far for her to go to check on her. Her mother is entitled to and has tried to get help from the municipal home care service, but it did not work for her. For a person with dementia, it is hard to have new people coming into the house every day, not remembering who they are and why they are there.

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If only the home care services worked in another way; if it was more of individual care. That one and the same person came to her every day and gave her the support that she needs. Yes, a person that is familiar with Mum and knows what she needs, who has learnt what Mum needs and who my Mum knows. But when different people come, ten of them in a team, it is not, it is not good. It can never be good.

So the home care service was cancelled after a short trial period, and now the main caregiver has to do all of the household work for her mother. In order to take care of her mother, Diana has reduced her working hours.

3.3 The changing role of the family caregiver Having to carry out direct care tasks – for instance at the end of the working day, in the evening, or most often on weekends and during holidays – is not the only aspect of the informal family caregiver’s role. Many of the working adult-children caregivers we surveyed in the six countries – particularly those who did not live near the parents who were being cared for – were not directly involved in concrete care tasks. This would have been impossible in the absence of cash-for-care schemes: except for well-off families, juggling work and care would have been an impossible challenge.

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In addition, allowances for leave and career breaks have facilitated the reconciliation of work and care responsibilities in a number of countries (Haynes et al. 2010). Although all six countries grant paid leave, the impact on users is not uniform. In our samples, we find this type of leave to be of particular benefit to, and strongly appreciated by, family caregivers in the Netherlands and Italy. The Netherlands has a formal leave system (Grootegoed, Da Roit & Knijn 2010) with three possible care leave solutions. Italy provides three days of fully paid leave per month for the care of a severely disabled person. This is greatly appreciated by family caregivers. This is confirmed by Edith, a French caregiver, who explains during the interview:

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It is not always easy to combine care and work. I have the feeling I’m running all the time … and if there are problems with my mother, the situation is even more difficult to deal with … What I need is to be able to take a day off in an emergency or to organise visits to services or doctors with my mother.

Nevertheless, in all cases, whatever the period of care leave, interviewees had a high level of involvement due to their coordination and management role (Da Roit & Le Bihan 2011). The diversification of care resources as a result of the new choices offered by cash payments or similar schemes, such as the Personal Budget (PGB) scheme in the Netherlands, has reinforced the need to organise and monitor care arrangements. In the past, when direct informal caregiving was the rule (alongside some complementary public provision of services for the poorest within a logic of social assistance), care management tended to coincide with self-management and with management of family relations at most. Today, the contribution of paid caregivers, professional or not, does not mean that there is no informal unpaid care provision but rather that the forms of care, especially if the caregiver is working, have evolved. The most onerous everyday care tasks may be delegated to professionals, but the family caregiver is still present, dealing with administrative problems and with the organisation of the care arrangements (Pommer, Woittiez & Stevens 2007). The opportunities for outsourcing care tasks that cash payments provide are not sufficient to cover the needs of elderly people and family caregivers, whose contributions remain necessary to ensure the quality of their care arrangements. New tensions have thus arisen in connection with the redefinition of the role of the family caregiver with paid work, who can outsource part of the caring tasks but still remains a significant provider of care as its coordinator and manager. A care arrangement is generally set up following the death of a partner, illness or hospitalisation. The caregivers therefore have the prime task of organising the care, starting with – in the best-case scenario – their own family, bringing together brothers and sisters at each new

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stage, discussing preferences and the possible involvement of each one, etc. These occasions tend to reveal how complex family relationships can be, and this complexity may in turn come into play in these care mechanisms (Le Bihan & Martin 2008). At the same time, in order to facilitate the work of the family, the caregiver may also be led to solicit the aid of care professionals. This involves gathering the necessary information from care services, making appointments, compiling care files, meeting the professional who will be in the home, explaining the customs and practices of the household, monitoring progress (e.g. by means of a correspondence book), managing any conflicts, etc. This may not be an easy task for the caregiver responsible, who discovers – sometimes for the first time – the maze of services and measures involved. In our sample, mediation between the main caregiver and the family and/or care services often becomes an onerous and time-consuming responsibility. Edith, in the French sample, is a good illustration of the difficult nature of the ‘care manager’ role. She spends a great deal of time organising her mother’s home support via a variety of services: home help, nursing and meal delivery. At each stage, Edith, who lives more than 150 kilometres away from her mother, travels to meet the service managers in person and organise the timetable with them. Faced with the repeated refusals of her mother to allow the caregivers into her home, Edith also has to manage the many conflicts that arise and to spend time convincing the professionals to continue with her mother’s care. Faced with increasing difficulties, Edith finally convinced her mother to move to a retirement home. In the Italian case, when a badante is hired (with or without a regular work contract), the caregiver has a dual role. He or she not only has to coordinate and supervise the hiring and paying of the migrant worker but also has to carry out a range of non-delegated tasks – from paperwork to money management, dealing with physicians and social services, and grocery shopping – and stand in for the badante when she is absent, i.e. on weekends and during the holidays. Care arrangements involving a badante clearly demonstrate the interdependence of informal and semi-formal types of care. This is the case for Rosmara, who hired a woman to look after her 74-year-old mother. The badante is not a live-in caregiver, as Rosmara’s father takes care of her mother at night: she is employed to work six to seven hours a day, six days a week. She provides personal care and does housework, as well as helping Rosmara’s father. Above all she [the paid migrant worker] takes care of my mother, but I must admit she is good … because my father is also difficult to put up with. In any case she takes care of everything under my supervision … as far as the household and all health problems are concerned I told her what has to be done and she does it. She is of great help … I deal with the doctors and all the bureaucratic stuff. The only thing my father still does is dealing with financial matters. He has hold of the money, he is still able to manage that,

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and I do not think it is right to take this autonomy away from him. Everything else, including the shopping, etc., I take care of. I go with him, but I am the one who does it.

This represents a case of high direct engagement and strictly supervised delegation, where a sort of cooperation between the informal (the family caregiver) and semi-formal type of care (the paid caregiver) seems to be in operation. Generally, as already mentioned, this type of care arrangement is extremely flexible. It enables interviewees to stick to their work commitments and to adjust the timing of their care responsibilities to their own family and private life. However, it is not always easy to make such arrangements: they demand continuous negotiation.

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4 Final remarks: Towards a ‘comprehensive’ mixed-care system? The trends outlined in this chapter point to the importance of the mix of formal, semi-formal and informal care, between public and private resources, in all the countries studied and both in childcare as well as elderly care arrangements. The qualitative findings identify norms and practices that combine a variety of care providers and sites of caring. Against a background of increasing generosity in cash-for-care and leave schemes, in particular for young children, and quite extensive formal services, undoubtedly significant in all the countries even if to varying degrees, the growing receptiveness to some flexibility in care providers and locations for care is also significant. Flexibility is a complex notion, developed in different fields with several connotations. At the macro-level, it often refers to labour market regulations and their impact on both economic activity and work organisation. At the micro-level, flexibility is considered to be positive when it facilitates adjustment to overall shifts in labour demand and negative when it produces exclusion and lack of choice. In our qualitative analysis of the care arrangements set up by parents of young children and adult children of elderly parents, the notion of flexibility is an important variable for widening caregivers’ range of choices in how to organise care arrangements. It refers to the capacity – the power of choice – of caregivers to package different resources, which in turn is closely related to the possibilities offered by care systems. Following feminist and disability rights theorists (Rummery & Fine 2012), caregivers should be free to choose whether or not to provide care and how to provide care. The qualitative analysis of the different care arrangements set up in the six countries shows the importance of flexibility as a way for caregivers who have a job and cannot (or are not willing) to be full-time caregivers to juggle work and care: to be able to free up time if the situation of the person being cared for requires their time, to recruit a professional caregiver to

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whom they can delegate part of the care tasks or to pay an informal caregiver who is considered to be the right person to care for their elderly parent. Flexibility refers to the possibility of combining ‘time, cash and services’ (Daly 2002), which are the main resources to which family caregivers should have access in order to achieve the ideal mix of care arrangements. Analysis also shows, however, that flexibility sometimes leads to a constrained rather than a free choice, since it may rely on unequal access to cash, time and services. Such cases represent more of a non-choice than a choice. It is interesting to see how the trend towards a more socially distributed and flexible care system translates into somewhat diverse care norms and practices in the context of different welfare and family cultures. In the case of childcare, grandparental care is valued in all countries for both its relational and instrumental support, but it may be more integrated into the care system as a backdrop support or as a key full-time arrangement for very small children under the age of three. However, flexible care providers and sites for care (i.e. daycare centres providing 24-hour care, professionals or babysitters recruited by families) are currently seen as important by all parents in the context of ensuring that children do not spend very long hours in formal care and that specific care providers are not overburdened. In the case of elderly care, flexibility and receptivity to diverse care providers is seen as important in allowing elderly people to stay at home and be independent for as long as possible. Flexibility also provides for alternative solutions which take into account both the caregivers’ and the elderly person’s preferences. Some elderly persons refuse to have strangers caring for them, while others prefer semi-formal solutions to professional care. Others prefer to be able to go to a daycare centre rather than stay alone at home with occasional home help. Care managers also like to have varied options for making care arrangements in accordance with the changing needs of the dependent person. Flexibility in providers and locations signifies stronger adaptability to the different stages of dependency. However, not all options are universally available, and both in childcare and elderly care, social inequality often makes for differential access to care arrangements, in particular to the privately paid full-time professional or non-professional caregiver. The extent to which comprehensive care is available differs between childcare and elderly care. For young children, formal care in pre-school from age three and in school from ages five to seven is assumed to be the norm. Parents who work atypical hours or full-time have to negotiate care arrangements and the time children spend in care/school around this norm. This in general makes for a fairly low variety of providers and locations for childcare, with flexibility introduced mainly in the time period around fetching and bringing the children to school or in the afternoons and on school-free days. By contrast, elderly care is not only more comprehensive, in that there are many different providers and locations,

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but also varies constantly over the different stages of dependency. Moreover, full institutional care, even if accepted as a solution for severe dependency, may not always be the ideal care arrangement. Negotiation of what is best and what is preferred may take place more often and throughout the different stages of dependency, with the mix and flexibility of care arrangements emerging as an important response to this difficult and ongoing negotiation process. In heuristic terms, traditional conceptual dichotomies such as familialisation/de-familialisation and formal/informal, are inadequate for analysing recent developments in care regimes. Pathways of national care systems differ, as do the intensity and prevalence of formal services. Some are more ‘de-familialised’, having gone much further in the development of extensive publicly subsidised full-time services than others. However, as some authors have suggested, we have to move beyond the analysis of these linear trends and develop new analytical categories in order to pinpoint and explain the complexities and multiplicities of care arrangements as they emerge from qualitative data. From this point of view, it is important to develop new concepts that capture the variety of care providers (such as the concept of ‘semi-formal’ care), but it is also important to understand the social processes that are encouraging this diversity. Our qualitative data suggests that the negotiation of flexibility, within a more comprehensive or mixed range of providers and social locations for care, is currently underpinning the organisation and pluralisation of care arrangements.

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About the contributors

Sofia Björk is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden where she obtained both her MA in Sociology and her BA in Development Studies. She is working on a PhD thesis about “Gender and moral ideals in negotiations of commitments in family care”. Ulla Björnberg is professor emerita in the Department of Sociology, Gothenburg University, Sweden. She received her PhD from the University of Gothenburg. She has been program director of several European research projects. Her research concerns family, family policy/welfare, work and family, gender, intergenerational relationships and refugees and migration. Arnaud Campéon is sociologist and assistant researcher at Ecole des hautes études en santé publique (EHESP) in Rennes, France. His main research areas are sociology of ageing and health. Sonia Cardoso-Correia is sociologist and worked as a researcher for the WOUPS project at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS), University of Lisbon, Portugal.

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Barbara Da Roit is political scientist and assistant professor ate the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on social care for elderly people, and family policies in a comparative perspective. Elisabetta Donati is sociologist. She lectures at the University of Torino, Italy. Her research domain is balancing work and family life during the life course. Hans Ekbrand is senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Gothenburg. His main research focuses on various aspects of violence, and on families as sites where care, support and violence are exchanged in complex relations. His PhD was on “Separations and men’s violence against women”. Wolfgang Keck is sociologist and researcher at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Germany. He is PhD student at the Free University of Berlin. The theme of his dissertation is “Reconciliation of caregiving of adult persons and employment”. His research inter195

Work and Care under Pressure : Care Arrangements Across Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook

ests are comparative welfare state research, intergenerational relations, long-term care, demographic change and triangulation-mixed methods. Christina Klenner is economist and works at the Fondation Hans-Böckler, Düsseldorf, Germany. Her research is on gender equality, women’s labour market participation and flexibilization. Trudie Knijn is sociologist and professor of interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University and visiting professor of the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She got her PhD at the University of Nijmegen. Her current research projects focus on social policy in comparative perspective, youth care, activation and European citizenship. Blanche Le Bihan is a political scientist and assistant professor at the Ecole des hautes études en santé publique (EHESP) in Rennes, France. Her main research areas are studies on ageing, social care and family policies in a comparative perspective. Claude Martin is sociologist and CNRS Research Professor at the Ecole des hautes études en santé publique (EHESP) in Rennes, France. His research domains are social policy and comparative welfare state analysis, social care and family policy.

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Manuela Naldini is sociologist and associate professor of sociology of the family at the University of Torino, Italy. She got her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. Her main research areas are family and social policy, comparative welfare state analysis, gender studies and social care. Sabine Neukirch is currently working at the Hochschule Niederrhein, Germany. Till recently she worked at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her research interests are comparative welfare state studies in the fields of employment, family life, care and migration. Sanda Samitca is sociologist and post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS), University of Lisbon, Portugal. She got her PhD at University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research domains are public health, family sociology, and social policy. Chiara Saraceno is sociologist and Honorary Fellow at the Carlo F. Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics, Torino, Italy. Until 2008 she was professor of sociology of family at the University of Torino, and until June 2011 research professor at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Germany. Her research focuses on family arrangements and family change; gender and intergenerational relations; welfare states and social policies; poverty and social exclusion.

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Karin Wall is a sociologist and a senior research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She studied sociology and got her PhD at the University of Geneva. She was a lecturer in sociology of work and then a Professor of Sociology of the Family at ISCTE – Department of Sociology. Presently she is a member of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Family Policies and of the International Network on Parental Leave Policy and Research. Her research domains are family and leave policies in a comparative perspective.

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CARE & WELFARE previously published

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Mirko Noordegraaf and Bram Steijn (eds.): Professionals under Pressure. The Reconfiguration of Professional Work in Changing Public Services, 2013 (isbn 978 90 8964 509 8) Jeannette Pols: Care at a Distance. On the Closeness of Technology, 2012 (isbn 978 90 8964 397 1) Patricia C. Henderson: AIDS, Intimacy and Care in Rural KwaZuluNatal. A Kinship of Bones, 2011 (isbn 978 90 8964 359 9) Janet Newman and Evelien Tonkens (eds.): Participation, Responsibility and Choice. Summoning the Active Citizen in Western European Welfare States, 2011 (isbn 978 90 8964 275 2) Barbara Da Roit: Strategies of Care. Changing Elderly Care in Italy and the Netherlands, 2010 (isbn 978 90 8964 224 0) Anne-Mei The: In Death’s Waiting Room. Living and Dying with Dementia in a Multicultural Society, 2008 (isbn 978 90 5356 077 8) Ine Van Hoyweghen: Risks in the Making. Travels in Life Insurance and Genetics, 2007 (isbn 978 90 5356 927 6) Jan Willem Duyvendak, Trudie Knijn and Monique Kremer (eds.): Policy, People, and the New Professional. De-professionalisation and Re-professionalisation in Care and Welfare, 2006 (isbn 978 90 5356 885 9)

Work and Care under Pressure : Care Arrangements Across Europe, Amsterdam University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook

Blanche Le Bihan is assistant professor at the School of Public Health (EHESP) in Rennes, France. Claude Martin is research professor at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Rennes, France. Trudie Knijn is professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University.

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European welfare states are experiencing tensions between labour market constraints and caring responsibilities of families. This book analyses these tensions by focusing on carers ‘under pressure’. It investigates the care arrangements set up by bi-active parents of young children and of employed adult children caring for their old parent(s). Based on studies in six European countries, Work and Care under Pressure: Care Arrangements across Europe combines the analysis of social policies and daily family life. It questions policies in childcare, elderly care and work-life balance, and highlights the carers’ practices and their impact on everyday life. By investigating different generations of men and women who take care of young children or/and an elderly parent, this book is an essential resource for all researchers, scholars and policy makers interested in social policies and care policies.

ISBN 978 90 8964 542 5

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