This paper argues that the gendered effects of the welfare state and the labor market cannot be separated, and to fully understand possibilities and effects of policy change in either requires studying the interaction of both. The EU promotes labor market flexibilization as a sort of universal cure to challenges faced by its member states such as low productivity and ageing populations, and this cure is explicitly argued to work through helping women reconcile work and family. By lowering labor market thresholds, offering part-time work and allowing employers to use less risky employment forms than permanent employment, such as temporary contracts, policymakers hope to facilitate mothers’ paid work.
The paper draws on a comparison of Italy and Sweden as two cases where labor market flexibilization is underway but that represent different types of welfare states, gender regimes, and labor markets, in order to study how labor market change is shaped by and interacts with welfare state and gender regime, how this affects the gendered outcome as well as possible policy strategies.
It criticizes the use of labor market flexibilization as a strategy to promote work family reconciliation or work life balance, arguing that this view is made possible only be stripping these concepts of their feminist potential and ignoring how the societal organization of earning and caring conditions the possibilities and effects of labor market change. A framework clarifying that work and family reconciliation can take many forms, all with different consequences for individual income and care security, is presented as a better way to analyse the gendered effects of labor market flexibilization within contexts characterized by different welfare state and gender regimes.
