engleski

Changes in Parental Leave Rights 2006-2017: Are European countries heading towards an employment– led social investment paradigm?

Together with social investment, work-family policies have become an area of growing concern. Within the social-investment approach, equality is a crucial element and protection should remain an important function of the welfare state, working as a necessary complement to activation rather than being substituted by it. Still, there has been a growing tendency at the political level to advocate employment-oriented policy instruments which aim to facilitate parents’ connection to the labour market, neglecting other aspects such as gender equality or social equity. It seems that this intensified in the course of the economic crisis and the increased commitment to austerity politics. In this paper, we focus on childcare- related leaves, which are a lynchpin of work- family and social-investment policies. The comparative literature has been predominantly oriented at the scope of benefits (e.g. leave duration, benefit generosity) for employed parents, while there is less knowledge about eligibility for leave rights, especially for parents less (securely) attached to the labour market. That conceals the inequalities in access and usage of parental leave rights among parents in and within different countries. In an earlier work (Dobrotić & Blum, 2018), we distinguished four different ideal-type approaches on how leave rights are granted (in-)dependent of parents’ labour market position: the universal parenthood model, the segmented parenthood model, the universal adult-worker model, and the segmented adult-worker model. In this paper, we will draw on information from the ‘International Review on Leave Policies’ to classify 21 European countries and recent policy reforms according to this distinction. By analysing parental leave developments between 2006 and 2017, we answer the question whether and to what extent European countries have shifted towards a more employment- oriented perspective in leave policymaking, and how these developments affect social and gender inequalities in access to parental leaves.

parental leave, social rights, social inequalities, gender equality

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