engleski

De-commodification or re-commodification: The changing relation of parental leave and parents' attachment to the labour market

Together with social investment, work-family policies have become an area of growing concern. Childcare-related leaves are a lynchpin of those policies. Within the social- investment approach, there is a tendency to focus support on dual-earner families, especially those typically connected to the labour market. The question thus emerges how this may affect leave policy reforms and, most importantly, the position of parents atypically connected to or not participating at the labour market. While there are, traditionally, differences in how countries grant leave rights independent of parents’ labour market position, the comparative literature has been predominantly oriented at leave policies for employed parents. There is limited knowledge about eligibility for leave in general, and about leave rights of parents less attached to the labour market in particular. In this paper, we start from a previous work (Dobrotic & Blum, forthcoming), in which we developed a conceptual framework that allows to distinguish different approaches on how parental leave rights are granted (in-)dependent of labour market position, and classified developments in 21 European countries (2006-2016) according to this distinction. In the outlook, we connect this with the question how these developments relate to paradigms in current family policymaking, such as to what extent European countries have followed perspectives of familialism or social investment.

parental leave, eligibility, reform, social rights, paradigms

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