Year: 2019
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Under what conditions do employers shift their social policy preferences and push governments to implement new policies?We study the reforms of work-family policies (WFPs), such as parental leave and daycare services, to address this question.1 WFPs have seen massive expansion since the 1970, but with strong crossnational variation in the speed of reforms.Given the strong growth of WFPs, we use them as a case to understand employers' preferences for regulation of labor markets through social policy.By combing the peculiarities of WFPs with considerations of how employers generally perceive the cost-benefit calculus of social policies, we elucidate why employers' preferences for WFP underwent dramatic changes between 1970 and today.Our theoretical contribution is to provide a dynamic argument about when and how employers go from opposing to supporting and proposing WFPs-and to what extent they can be expected to influence policy outcomes.Our novel claim is that the rise of knowledge economies-characterized by skill-biased technological change, increases in education levels, and the reversal of the gender gap in higher education 2 -shapes employers' interests for WFPs.With women starting to outnumber men in higher education, employers will call for expansion of WFPs in order to secure that these high-skilled, potential employees remain attached to the labor market in case of childbirth.The gender gap reversal is, in other words, key to understanding the change in capital's preferences for WFPs.The theoretical focus on employers, however, becomes myopic if it fails to take into account the social institutions in which employers are embedded.The social partners must be able to influence policy to see their new preference for WFPs realized.Corporatist institutions organized at the national level-what Martin & Swank (2012) have labeled "macro-corporatism"-facilitate cooperation and 1 This chapter forms a part of a broader project on the social partners and work-family policies (for a supplemental examination of trade unions and cross-class coalitions, see Rasmussen & Skorge, 2018).
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2991758592