The Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model: Implications for Work and Care

JANE LEWIS Downloaded from

The Decline of the Male

Breadwinner Model: http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ Implications for Work and Care at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015

Modern welfare systems have always been constructed around the relationship between social provision and paid work; it is this that has in large measure distinguished them from needs-based and universal, but punitively deterrent, poor law systems. Governments have always been concerned about the conditions for providing welfare,1 that is, the nature of entitlements in the language of many policy analysts, but more a matter of conditionality in the mind of government. There has been a long-standing firm conviction too that wages are the best form of welfare. In the United Kingdom, almost 100 years ago the Labour party fought for a legislative proposal called the Right to Work Bill more fiercely than it did for pensions, while it was not at all keen on the new idea of social insurance because trade unions feared state intrusion into the territory of mutual- ity. What was at stake of course was the fight for the old-style labor contract, to which social insurance was successfully joined in all western European countries, and which is now under profound review (Supiot 1999). The settlement at the heart of the modern welfare state was that between capital and labor. But as feminists have long argued (Wilson 1977; Land 1980; Lewis 1992) and as the main- stream social policy and sociology literature (e.g., Esping-Andersen 1999; Crouch 1999) has recently begun to recognize, there was a second key settlement between men and women.

Social Politics Summer 2001 6 2001 Oxford University Press Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model • 153

The old labor contract was designed first and foremost for the regularly employed male breadwinner, and provision had to be made for women. The gender settlement meant that those marginal to the labor market got cash cover via dependents' benefits. Alain Supiot (1999) has described the labor/capital settlement in terms of security traded for dependence. A similar set of arrangements can be said to have characterized the gender settlement. The male breadwinner Downloaded from model was based on a set of assumptions about male and female contributions at the household level: men having the primary responsibility to earn and women to care for the young and the old. Female dependence was inscribed in the model. The male breadwinner model built into the postwar settlement assumed regular and full http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ male employment and stable families in which women would be provided for largely via their husbands' earnings and social contributions. A pure male breadwinner model never existed; women always engaged in the labor market. But there were historical periods in some countries and for some social classes for which the model more accu-

rately described the social reality than others: for people of the mid- at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 dling sort in the United Kingdom and the United States in the late nineteenth century and large tracts of the middle and respectable working classes in the years following World War II in many western countries (Horrell and Humphries 1997; Janssens 1998; Land 1980; Lewis 1992). There has been an enormous behavioral change in the second half of the twentieth century, with increasing numbers of women entering the labor market. Indeed, this has become one point of convergence among European Union (EU) member states. Family change, which has resulted in family breakdown, more fluidity in intimate relationships, and a large increase in single-person households, has also contributed to the erosion of the male breadwinner model at the behavioral level. But, crucially, the male breadwinner model also worked at the level of prescription. Policy makers treated it as an "ought" in terms of relationships between men and women, and in many countries it served to underpin both social policies that assumed female dependence on a male wage and family law, which made the same assumptions about the marriage contract in terms of stability and the nature of the contribution made by men and women in families, seeking to enforce them through fault-based divorce (Weitzman 1985). These assumptions were particularly strong in some European countries, particularly the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and The Nether- lands. I am going to argue that in the United Kingdom and in The Neth- erlands there is evidence of a pendulum shift toward what might be 154 • Lewis termed an "adult-worker model family," whereby it is assumed that all adults are in the labor market. However, this shift in assumptions has outrun the social reality, for there is a gap between the "one- and-a-half earner" family that characterizes labor market behavior in the majority of European countries and the set of policy assumptions that increasingly tend to assume full individualization. The second part of the article examines the policy implications in more detail Downloaded from for the United Kingdom. An "adult-worker model" holds out more promise for women than the dependence inherent in the male breadwinner model. Given the trend toward the "individualization of the social" (Guillemard 1986; Ferge 1997), together with massive family change over the last http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ quarter century resulting in a large increase in lone-mother families in many northern and western European countries, women need more access to wages. In the second part of the article, I also suggest that much hinges on the way in which such a model is implemented. In particular, given that it is women who tend to work part-time, policies that recognize care work are crucial. Where these are absent,

policies based on the new set of adult-worker assumptions are as at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 likely to fail to meet women's real needs as did the old male breadwinner model.

From a Male Breadwinner to an Adult-Worker Model: Policy Assumptions and the Social Reality In the immediate postwar decades, the gendered division of work, paid and unpaid, was sufficiently in line with the male breadwinner model, certainly in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands, to give rise to a set of normative expectations about the roles of men and women within the family that underpinned social policies, for example, with respect to the lesser contributions and benefits paid by married women under the social insurance system, and that in turn rein- forced the model (see Figure 1). The change in both female labor market participation and, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the rapid change in family

Male-breadwinner model family ~ Assumptions regarding the position of men as earners and . women as housewife/caregivers embodied in policies

Figure 1. The male breadwinner model. Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model • 155 structure was bound to undermine the coherence of the relationships portrayed in Figure 1. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, research revealed the extent to which the male breadwinner system no longer described behavior for a significant proportion of families (Crompton 1999). But nor have families become fully individualized, with both partners engaged in full-time work and economically independent of one another. The male breadwinner model Downloaded from has eroded, but the social reality is still far from a family comprised of self-sufficient, autonomous individuals. While women's behavior has changed substantially with respect to paid work, they still per- form the bulk of unpaid care work. Men have changed much less with respect to the amount of either paid or unpaid work they do http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ (e.g., Gershuny, Godwin, and Jones 1994). The pattern of paid work between men and women in households is now much more difficult to predict, but patterns of unpaid work have not changed so much. In the case of the United Kingdom, the British General Household Survey shows that in 1975, 81 percent of men and 62 percent of women 16 to 64 years old were economically active; by 1996 this

figure was 70 percent for both men and women (ONS 1998, Tables at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 5.8 and 5.9). Married women are as likely to be employed as non- married women. Increases have been similar in other strong male breadwinner countries. For example, in The Netherlands, the rate of increase in the net labor market participation of women has been more dramatic, from 29 percent of all adult women in 1975 to 51 percent in 1999. The comparable figures for men were 79 percent and 76 percent (Keuzekamp and Oudhof 2000).2 But in both countries short part-time working is very common for women. Almost a quarter of British women with children under ten worked fifteen or fewer hours per week in the late 1990s (Thair and Risdon 1999), and 24 percent of all female employees worked less than twenty hours a week (Rubery, Smith, and Fagan 1998). The vast majority of Dutch women work part-time—80 percent in 1994; 33 percent work less than twenty hours a week. The percentage of dual-earner families with two full-time workers actually decreased in The Netherlands, from 43 to 33 percent between 1990 and 1994 (Hooghiemstra 1997).3 With respect to family structure, the pace of change in the recent past for the United Kingdom has been greater than in regard to the labor market. The divorce rate increased threefold and the rate of unmarried motherhood fourfold in one generation. Cohabitation is the driver of much of the change; it is now sequel and alternative to marriage and has contributed to the increasing separation of marriage and parenthood, which constitutes a more profound shift than the 1960s separation of sex and marriage (Lewis and Kiernan 1996). 156 • Lewis

British Household Panel data show that cohabiting relationships in the United Kingdom are four times more unstable than marriage (Er- misch and Francesconi 2000). In The Netherlands the changes have been less dramatic; lone-mother families represented only 10 percent of all families with dependent children in 1993, whereas the equivalent figure for the United Kingdom was 22 percent (van Drenth, Knijn, and Lewis 1999). Downloaded from Nevertheless, it seems that on the work and family front, we are seeing more individualization. Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim (1999, 54) has described the effects of individualization on the family in terms of "a community of need" becoming "an elective relationship." In this interpretation, the family used to be a community of need held http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ together by the obligations of solidarity. But women's increased labor market participation, together with family change and instabil- ity, have resulted in new divisions between biography and family. Burns and Scott (1994) have made a similar point in their discussion of the way in which male and female roles in the family have become " decomplementary."

Table 1 shows the range of possible contributions of men and at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 women to paid work at the household level and speculates on the nature of care provision that accompanies different gendered patterns of paid and unpaid work. The precise nature of the erosion of the male breadwinner model is complicated. There has been no simple move from a male breadwinner to a dual-career model. Rather, in most western countries, some kind of dual-breadwinner model has become the norm. Often, given women's lower earnings, this amounts to a one-and-a-half earner model—in other words the dual-earner models 2 and 3 in Table 1. Model 3 is a more gender-equal model and has not been achieved in any country, although it is the official policy of the Dutch government, with its "combination scenario," and The Netherlands has somewhat more part-time work for men (seventeen percent of Dutch men work part-time, but a majority of these are either young or over 55). It is now widely accepted that women will engage in paid work, and attitudinal surveys have shown consistent increases in the accep- tance by men and women of female employment at all stages of the life course (Dex 1988). But to what extent—full-time or some form of part-time—varies considerably according to social class, ethnicity, and sometimes region. Nor are the accompanying assumptions with respect to unpaid work predictable. Policy makers have recognized the existence of greater individualization in regard to labor market and family behavior, without taking on board the complexities of the way in which the male breadwinner model has been eroded. A striking example of the pendulum shift in the assumptions underpin- Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model • 157

Table 1. Patterns of male and female paid work and arrangements for care 1. Male-Breadwinner Model Male FT earner Female FT caregiver 2. Dual-Breadwinner Model 1

Male FT earner, female short PT Care supplied mainly by Downloaded from earner female earner and kin 3. Dual-Breadwinner Model 2 Male FT earner, female long PT Care supplied mainly by kin, earner and state/voluntary/market 4. Dual-Breadwinner Model 3 http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ Male PT earner, female PT earner Care supplied by male and female earners 5. Dual-Career Model Male FT earner, female FT earner Care supplied mainly by the market and kin/state/voluntary sector 6. Single-Earner (Lone-Mother at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 Family) Model Female earner FT or PT, or FT Care supplied either by the mother reliant on state benefits mother or by the mother, kin, and the state FT, full-time; PT, part-rime. ning policies took place in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands in the mid-1990s with respect to lone mothers. This group of women has always been particularly problematic for a male breadwinner re- gime because it must be decided whether and on what terms the state will step in to replace the father (Lewis 1998). Both national governments swung from treating lone mothers as mothers, with no requirement to register for employment until their youngest child was sixteen, to treating them as full-time workers, regardless of the fact that a majority of married mothers actually work part-time (Lewis 1997). In both countries, the rationale had much to do with reducing dependence on state benefits, but it was supported by argu- ments regarding the greater labor market participation of married mothers, without it being acknowledged that the vast majority of these women work short part-time hours. Changes in behavior with respect to the labor market and the family have rent the whole fabric of gender roles that were assumed by policy makers to flow from the male breadwinner model. When the 158 • Lewis gap between changes in behavior and the pattern of gendered assumptions following from the model became too great, the rupture led to a new set of policy assumptions. Female employment is now expected, although to what degree and for which groups of women remains unclear. This is not surprising given that the new assumptions may actually be running ahead of behavioral change. Figure 2 illustrates what happens when the feedback loop that operated in Downloaded from Figure 1 is broken. Governments in the United Kingdom and The Netherlands have moved dramatically toward assuming that women will be in the labor market. These assumptions come into conflict, first, with the expressed desire of a large proportion of women in these countries to put care http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ work first. Even if good-quality, affordable child care were to be provided overnight, it is not clear that all women would want to work full-time. British Labour Force Survey data report that ninety percent of women with children who work part-time do not want full-time work (Thair and Risdon 1999). This is, of course, under the current constraint of poor child care provision relative to that of

most other European countries. Hakim (1996) has argued strongly at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 that the British female labor force divides into a group of committed career women and another group that is content to choose part-time work (and undertake care). Hakim's model is controversial because it highlights choice and underplays constraints. However, in Britain and The Netherlands there is evidence that lone mothers, for example, want to care (van Drenth, Knijn, and Lewis 2000; see also Ford [1996] and Duncan and Edwards [1999]). It may be that alternative moral rationalities underpin women's commitment to family work (Tronto 1993; Ahlander and Bahr 1995; Duncan and Edwards 1999), and that, given the choice between even a well-paying job and unpaid care work for a child or elderly relatives, some women would prefer the latter. Knijn and Wei's (2001) evaluation of the new policy in The Netherlands that treats lone mothers as workers rather than as mothers has shown that the policy failed at the local level because neither social workers charged with its implementation nor the

One-and-a-half-earner^ • Shift in assumptions family \ / underpinning policies toward an equal dual-earner model

Ambiguities in the translation of an adult-worker model into policy

Figure 2. Towards an adult-worker model. Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model • 159

mothers themselves believed that they should be pushed into the labor market. Second, the new adult-worker model often conflicts with the exist- ing mechanisms for delivering social programs (such as means-tested social assistance), which may continue to operate in accordance with older, male breadwinner-based assumptions. The result is a set of policies that is far from consistent, as the next section shows for the Downloaded from U.K. case.

The Social Policy Implications of the New Assumptions

in the United Kingdom http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ Evidence that governments are moving toward assuming the existence of an adult rather than a male breadwinner model is not hard to find, although the Dutch and U.K. examples may be the most striking. The U.K. Labour government has made the drive from welfare to work central to its social policy. Tony Blair's introduction to the document on welfare reform has been widely quoted—"work

for those who can; security for those who cannot" (Cm 3805 1998, at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 iii)—and contrasted with the Beveridgean promise of security for all. The introduction also made clear that this approach was to apply to women as well as men: "the welfare state based around the male breadwinner is increasingly out of date" (Cm 3805 1998, 13). There are several strands of thought that have fed the profound shift that the U.K. government has made with respect to assumptions about appropriate models of work for women (see Lister 2000a), none of which have to do with the welfare of women per se. First, a major influence on governments of the early and mid-1990s was the view of American New Right theorists that all those in receipt of state benefits had a concomitant obligation to engage in paid labor. Lawrence Mead (1986) presented this solution in terms of a model of equal citizenship and something that would bring about greater social integration. Welfare-to-work, implemented first in the United States, embodied these ideas and was applied to all able-bodied adults, lone mothers included. In the United States, prior to the pass- ing of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act, it was openly argued not only that it was a fun- damental obligation on the part of able-bodied people to enter the labor market (Mead 1986), but that it would be better in the case of lone-mother families for children to experience one breadwinner as opposed to none (Novak and Cogan 1987). Second, social democrats, like Mead, but unlike more radical crit- ics of "welfare dependency" (such as Charles Murray), have also stressed the overriding importance of employment as a means to so- 160 • Lewis cial integration or inclusion. In the case of the British Labour Party, this was in line with its long-standing belief in wages as the best form of welfare. The effort to get more lone mothers into the labor market has been justified as much by reference to improving the welfare of the mothers themselves as by condemnation of welfare dependency. This position is shared by many feminists, who, while they have long stressed the need to recognize the unpaid work of care (Finch and Downloaded from Groves 1983), have also long campaigned for women's economic and financial independence (Mclntosh 1981). For Labour, welfare- to-work is an idea that is central to "third-way" politics, and as Dea- con (1998) has suggested, represents a combination of welfare conceptualized as self-interest, authority, and moral regeneration. http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ Third, the idea of globalization and its implications for social programs has been influential for both Conservatives and Labour. Con- servatives subscribed largely to the neoliberal prescriptions of the "Washington consensus," which dictated private rather than public provision, allocation by markets rather than on the basis of need, targeting rather than universal provision, charging rather than tax-

based finance, and decentralization rather than central planning (Pia- at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 chaud 2000). However, the effects of what might be termed "globalization talk" have been more dramatic in terms of the pattern of restructuring of social programs than on cuts in those programs. The increased demands for competitiveness have lent support to major welfare state services that can be perceived as increasing human capital (chiefly education and health), while at the same time serving to justify a tougher approach to cash benefits. The call to ensure reciprocity by matching entitlement to benefits with concomitant responsibilities to train or to work is one such approach, although Labour's strategy in the United Kingdom of a minimum wage and in-work benefits has also been a response to the trade-off between equity and employment that became much more unfavorable for low-skilled workers during the 1980s as a result of the low-wage, flexible labor market strategy (Vandenbroucke 1998). The globalization thesis directs the attention of governments to labor markets and competitiveness (Gough 1996). European Com- mission documents show this clearly. The commission has stressed the importance of adult labor market participation in the context of a strategy to increase European competitiveness (CEC 1993, 1995). In the economic strategy documents of the commission, there is little reference to the family and family responsibilities, yet there is also obvious concern at the EU level with the work/family nexus, as expressed, for example, in the "Directive on Parental Leave" (EC96/ 34). The point is that these two agendas remain parallel and separate and the former predominates. Thus greater labor market participa- Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model • 161 tion is seen as the best way of securing competitive advantage, keeping public expenditures down (especially with respect to the growing numbers of lone mother families), and promoting social inclusion and reducing poverty. An adult-worker model as a basis for policy making is not neces- sarily a bad thing; it all depends on the terms. Problems arise when governments legislate on the basis of an "ought" rather than an "is," Downloaded from especially when, in the case of women's behavior with respect to paid and unpaid work, the social reality is so complicated. There are major dangers for women in a trend from provision based on social contributions toward provision based on individually defined contributions if it is assumed that they are economically independent adult http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ workers when they patently are not. The existence of what is in fact a one-and-a-half earner rather than a fully fledged adult-worker model means that more attention has to be paid to policies that • compensate for and encourage the more equal sharing of the care work that all societies need (even if, or especially because, birth rates are falling precipitously in many European countries and the proportion of frail elderly people requiring care at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 is rising). • promote transitions between different types of work, paid and unpaid, over the life course, with due attention to the issue of lifetime earnings. • provide life chance guarantees so that those women (and men) entering low-paid flexible jobs (often in human services) have the chance to leave them and those who do stay in them are compensated. The last of these involves much more elaboration than can be en- compassed in this article and includes the urgent issue of how to improve women's position in the labor market. I will merely signal some of the possibilities that have been raised recently in regard to new mechanisms to promote the redistribution of cash and time. With respect to the first two points, the Labour government's empha- sis on welfare-to-work, a minimum wage, labor market activation programs, and "making work pay" via a new tax credit system ad- vances the idea that all adults, women included, will be employed. First, however, there is some evidence to suggest that these policies may still be driven more by attention to public expenditure levels than by a belief that waged labor will promote the welfare of women. The New Deal for Lone Parents, which made lone mothers part of the welfare-to-work strategy, was not made compulsory. However, with the introduction in 2001 of a "single gateway" which combines the Employment Service and those parts of the Benefits Agency that 162 • Lewis

pay benefits to people of working age, benefits become conditional on an interview. While there is still no requirement that lone mothers become workers, the interview is work focused. However, only slightly more than half the lone parents attending an initial New Deal interview by December 1999 came from the target group of women with school-age children, who are seen as most likely to enter the labor market (Millar 2000). As Evans (2000, 26) has remarked, the Downloaded from incentive structures of the British system "prioritise the move into work and reinforce the view that welfare-to-work is a single point transition." But this is unrealistic given the nature of many of the jobs available and of the care responsibilities that women in particu-

lar bear. http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ In so far as married women are concerned, there is still a sense that this group of women falls between the new assumptions about employment on the one hand and the older assumption that if necessary they can fall back on a male breadwinner for support. In fact the policy logic of the U.K.'s welfare system poses difficulties for policy makers wishing to promote an adult-worker model. Means-

tested social security systems have historically entailed the operation at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 of particular disincentive effects to the labor market participation of the female partners of unemployed men (Baldwin and Falkingham 1994). The Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC), the centerpiece of Labour's policies to "make work pay," seeks to encourage labor market participation, especially by lone mothers, and includes a child care tax credit. However, its effect on women with partners may be equivocal because it is administered on the basis of joint earnings and may thus reduce the incentive for partnered women in what are often low-wage jobs to enter employment (Rake forthcoming; McLaughlin, Trewsdale, and McCay 2001). In fact, as Lister (2000b) has pointed out, policy may still be confused about the extent to which women are conceptualized as being fully individualized. Both increased means testing and the move toward tax/benefit integration work in the opposite direction of individualization and the promo- tion of an adult-worker model. Thus the New Deal for the Partners of the Unemployed (mainly women) treats them both as having an independent relationship to the labor market and as dependents. Their access to the program depends on their being the partner of an unemployed man. The 1.4 million women with employed partners who say that they would like to be in paid work are not included in the New Deal because the aim of government in this instance is to do something about workless families rather than the needs of women per se. It is still assumed that women with employed male partners can depend on them if necessary. However, the high level of risk of family breakdown, together with an increasing expectation Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model • 163 that wages will be sufficient for self-provision, particularly in the area of pensions, makes this equivocation with respect to the wives of employed men dangerous for the women concerned. Policies to address the issue of unpaid work in the United King- dom are less coherent and less well funded than those addressing the issue of increasing labor market participation, even though the very existence of something like the National Childcare Strategy marks a Downloaded from significant departure for a country that has, since 1945, denied a role for the state in reconciling family and workplace responsibilities (Hantrais and Letablier 1996). The child care tax credit, introduced as part of the working families tax credit, meets seventy percent of the cost of care for one child to a maximum of £100, and £150 for http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ two. But it is paid only to those in work and assumes that employment precedes child care, whereas the process of arranging work and child care tends to be "chicken and egg" for the women involved. If the conditions for a more gender-equal adult-worker model are to be met, it will be necessary to learn more lessons from continental Euro- pean countries.

During the late twentieth century, two countries operated an at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 adult-worker model regardless of sex: Sweden and the United States. In many U.S. states, the obligation placed upon women with children as young as three months to enter the labor market, often in low- paid "Mcjobs," is embedded in a residual welfare system that often borders on the punitive, whereas in Sweden it is supported by an extensive range of care entitlements with respect to children and older people. To pursue the example of lone mothers, the United States has gone much more wholeheartedly than Britain down the road of treating these women as paid workers, imposing time-limited benefits and sanctioning welfare applicants who fail to enter training programs or look for work. Employment rates of lone mothers are high in the United States; the push factor is strong. But employment rates are higher still in Sweden, and lone mothers' poverty rates are much lower than in the United Kingdom or the United States (Hob- son and Takahashi 1997). Indeed, Sweden comes closest to having achieved Lawrence Mead's ideal in that all adult citizens are obliged to engage in paid work in order to qualify for a wide range of benefits, which then permit them to leave the labor market. However, Swedish lone mothers still get one-third of their income from the state. The system is based on a commitment to universal citizenship entitlements rather than, as in the United States, on grafting equal citizenship obligations onto a residual welfare model. Put simply, the Scandinavian adult-worker model recognizes care. All able-bodied adults are treated as citizen-workers, but after that permission to exit the labor market in order to care is granted via programs such as 164 • Lewis parental leave with generous wage replacement, and formal care services are provided. The model is a universalist one with provision for "difference" grafted on. Sweden, however, has one of the most sexually segregated labor markets in the western world; it is the public service sector above all where the work culture acknowledges the right to time to care, and it is there that women are employed. This sends a strong signal about Downloaded from the need to address the issue of work time and sharing unpaid as well as paid work. Shorter working days or shorter working weeks (the implications for gender equality may be different) are vital if a fairer division of unpaid work is to be achieved. Creighton (1999) has concluded that policies to address working time are crucial. As http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ it is, in Britain, men have the longest (paid) working hours in Europe. Labour has taken steps to promote parental leave, in line with the European Commission directive on the issue (EC 96/34), but the very short 13-week leave has been confined to the parents of children born after December 1999 and remains unpaid, while the opt-outs from the European Commission's directive on working time (EC 93/ 104) allow the very British male "long hours culture" to persist. The OECD (1991) promoted the idea of combining work and care for at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 men and women almost a decade ago and the Dutch government formally accepted the idea of such a "combination scenario" two years ago. The Scandinavian countries have recently implemented the "daddy month," a period of parental leave that is either taken by men or is lost to the family. Nevertheless, choices with respect to policies to ensure that care work is shared and compensated are difficult and must be carefully balanced. Formal service provision for child care tends to promote female labor force participation; the provision of cash allowances tends to reduce it (Leira 1998). So far continental European policies that do take on board the need to value care work have operated within the framework of social insurance or, in the case of Denmark, tax-based provision. There is no reason why a place for social insurance with respect to specific contingencies should not remain. But the likely continued growth of low-paid jobs that are "flexible" in any one of a number of dimensions means that other solutions need to be canvassed. A pure "basic income" model is unlikely to prove popular with governments increasingly concerned about responsibilities and preoccupied with promoting active rather than passive welfare. But a "participation income" of some kind that recognizes voluntary and care work (proposed by Atkinson [1995, 1996] and close to Boissonart's idea of "activity contracts" [Supiot 1999]) warrants consideration. Recent proposals have costed out a stepped approach to tax-benefit reform and different forms of basic income (Jordan, Agulnik, Burbidge, and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Model • 165

Duff in 2000). In the shorter term, governments need to pay closer attention to policies that make it easier to enter and to leave the labor market for cause over the life course. If labor market activation policies are one side of this coin, care leaves of one kind or another are the other side. But care leaves mean in turn that governments must pay more attention to people's, and as matters stand, especially women's, lifetime relationship to the labor market. Analysis of wom- Downloaded from en's lifetime earnings carried out for the U.K. Women's Unit (located in the Cabinet Office) calculated that the combined effect of the earnings gap between men and women and the "mother gap" means that low-skilled married women with two children earn £500,000 less than their husbands over their lifetimes, with concomitant implica- http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ tions for their pension position (Women's Unit 1999). Pension credits for periods of care are often woefully inadequate, and the second pension credits for caregivers proposed by Labour are more re- stricted than for the basic pension. With respect to the need to enable people to move on from poorly paid jobs and to assure those who do not of protection, education

and "lifetime learning" are the policy "buzzwords," but ideas such at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 as Offe's (1997) proposals for lifetime "leisure accounts," whereby citizens (after a minimum number of contribution years) can draw upon their retirement savings accounts for education, training, care- giving, or vacation, are also relevant, as is Ackerman and Alstott's (1999) proposal to give every newborn child a substantial endow- ment that may be used for training or education. Offe's proposals raise the issue of redistributing paid working time over the life course of the individual, which, while important, should not obscure the need to promote a more gender-equal sharing of the working day and the working week. But as Esping-Andersen's (1999, 2000) recent contributions have emphasized, education alone cannot ensure that all move out of low-paid work, and these people must be guaranteed a level of income above the poverty line. The Labour government in the United Kingdom is committed to "making work pay" and has instigated the working families tax credit, which extends to considerably more families than the U.S. equivalent, the Earned Income Tax Credit. But at the same time, part-time workers have been narrowly defined for the purposes of implementing EC Directive 97/81 on their treatment, a matter of considerable importance for women, who con- stitute the bulk of the part-time workforce. Part-timers must be able to compare themselves to full-time workers with the same type of contract (Statutory Instrument 2000). Thus government's own esti- mate is that only 400,000 out of six million part-time workers will benefit. For those who cannot work, benefit adequacy remains a huge issue. 166 • Lewis

In other words, as the Supiot (1999) report on European employment contracts stresses, there is a real need to rethink the principles underpinning social welfare systems. Arguably, Labour has gone partway down this road, putting in place social security policies that are designed both to ameliorate the employment/equity trade-off inherent in the creation of a flexible and low-paid workforce and to ensure reciprocity in the form of contractual welfare. Glennerster Downloaded from (1999) may be right that Labour has the makings of an entirely new welfare model, but at present it is seriously incomplete. A major part of the rethinking of principles underpinning social provision has involved an explicit acknowledgment of the erosion of the male breadwinner family. A simple adult-worker model has become central to http://sp.oxfordjournals.org/ a range of policy positions on the organization of "welfare." How- ever, the social reality is rather more complicated. The gendered division of both paid and especially unpaid work remains unequal. This means that any assumptions as to future self-provisioning on the basis of wages (for example, with respect to pensions) is fraught with danger for women. An adult-worker model that takes due account

of society's need for care work—that practices "fair reciprocity," at Northwestern University Library, Serials Department on March 10, 2015 to use White's (2000) term—is undoubtedly more advantageous to women than policies based on the male breadwinner model. How- ever, policies to promote the valuing and sharing of unpaid work, facilitate transitions between it and paid work over the life course, and make adequate provision for those who remain in low-paid jobs (often women in paid care work) have not yet reached as high a place in the policy agenda as the desire to promote paid employment.

NOTES 1. I use welfare in the broad, European sense. 2. I am grateful to Trudie Knijn for this reference. 3. I am grateful to Trudie Knijn for this reference.

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