"Families in market economies have long been confronted by the demands of participating in paid work and providing care. Across Europe the social, economic and political environment within which families do so has been subject to substantial change in the post-World War II era and governments have come under increasing pressure to engage with this important area of public policy. In the UK, as elsewhere, the tensions which lie at the heart of the paid work/unpaid care conflict remain unresolved posing substantial difficulties for all of law's subjects both as carers and as the recipients of care. What seems like a relatively simple goal - to enable families to better balance care-giving and paid employment - has been subject to and shaped by shifting priorities over time leading to a variety of often conflicting policy approaches. This book critiques how working families in the UK have been subject to regulation. It aims to: · Chart the development of the UK's law and policy framework by focusing on the post-war era and the growth and decline of the welfare state with a longer historical trajectory considered where appropriate. · Suggest an alternative policy approach based on Martha Fineman's vulnerability theory in which the vulnerable subject replaces the liberal subject as the focus of legal intervention. This reorientation enables a more inclusive and cohesive policy approach and has great potential to contribute to the reconciliation of the unresolved conflict between paid work and care-giving"--

It is due time that we understood that regulating the family has been a longstanding goal of labor regulation. This article presents the trajectory of labor regulation as family regulation. It provides a history of the “decent standards” discourse pertaining to wage and hour regulation, and reveals its double meanings: to provide “decent work” and to promote “decent families.” It terms the goal of providing decent standards of work and wages as “productive decency” and the goals pertaining to family decency, proper gender norms, and sexual purity as “repressive decency.” It shows how labor regulation surprisingly began in the Progressive Era as a means to lower divorce rates by fighting prostitution and address concerns over maternal functions and domestic roles in the family at the beginning of the 20th century, and how it culminated in the New Deal as reproducing the husband-as-breadwinner family model in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Despite the notion that federal law does not interfere in the personal relationship between husband and wife in such mundane and private issues as “who does the dishes,” regulating the family has, in fact, been a longstanding goal of labor regulation. Understanding labor regulation as regulating the family allows scholars and lawmakers to revisit the family model as established through existing labor law and to redesign the law for the Twenty-First Century. The article concludes by suggesting that the 2010 amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act should be understood as a new “entering wedge” toward a re-working of the relationship between the labor market, husbands, wives, and families, and that additional reform is highly merited in light of both the historically-conscious trajectory put forth, and contemporary ideologies about gender and the family.

Families in market economies have long been confronted by the demands of participating in paid work and providing care. Across Europe the social, economic and political environment within which families do so has been subject to substantial change in the post-World War II era and governments have come under increasing pressure to engage with this important area of public policy. In the UK, as elsewhere, the tensions which lie at the heart of the paid work/unpaid care conflict remain unresolved posing substantial difficulties for all of law's subjects both as carers and as the recipients of care. What seems like a relatively simple goal – to enable families to better balance care-giving and paid employment – has been subject to and shaped by shifting priorities over time leading to a variety of often conflicting policy approaches. This book critiques how working families in the UK have been subject to regulation. It has two aims: · To chart the development of the UK's law and policy framework by focusing on the post-war era and the growth and decline of the welfare state, considering a longer historical trajectory where appropriate. · To suggest an alternative policy approach based on Martha Fineman's vulnerability theory in which the vulnerable subject replaces the liberal subject as the focus of legal intervention. This reorientation enables a more inclusive and cohesive policy approach and has great potential to contribute to the reconciliation of the unresolved conflict between paid work and care-giving.

"Working Families is a pioneering study by scholars of great capability and insight. This book is a gold mine of observations and information about new approaches to the study of work and family."—Arlene Daniels, co-editor of The Most Difficult Revolution "Hertz and Marshall have pulled together an impressive collection. The range of well-known authors provide a broad perspective by looking at both women and men across class, work site, and race. Working Families provides cutting edge and original contributions that go well beyond previous research on work and families."—Naomi Gerstel, author of Families and Work "The information age is transforming family life and the relationships between families, the workplace, and larger society. Working Families moves the discussion of work and family beyond the simplistic notion of 'balancing' by examining the complexity and diversity of everyday family life, as well as the wider economic and political contexts of our current dilemmas."—Arlene Skolnick, author of Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty "The worlds of work and family in which we live our lives are ever more complex. This important volume sheds lights on the issues faced by working families at home, at work, and in their community."—Kathleen Christensen, Director, Program on Working Families, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn’t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.

Why does the United States assign responsibility for different aspects of labor and employment law (e.g., wages and hours, safety and health, collective bargaining, discrimination, etc.) to different agencies, when France, Spain, and their former colonies assign all aspects of labor and employment law to a single agency? Does the US approach, which essentially reduces to "one inspector per law," perform better or worse than the "Latin" model, which implies "one inspector per firm?" And what are the implications for the division of labor in the public sector more generally? Root-Cause Regulation addresses these questions by comparing the evolution of labor market regulation in developed and developing countries over the course of the past century. The results speak not only to the protection of work and workers in the twenty-first century but to the organization of the public sector more generally.--

During the middle third of the 20th century, workers in most industrialized countries secured a substantial measure of job security, whether through legislation, contract or social practice. This “standard employment contract,” as it was known, became the foundation of an impressive array of rights and entitlements, including social insurance and pensions, protection against unsociable working conditions, and the right to bargain collectively. Recent changes in technology and the global economy, however, have dramatically eroded this traditional form of employment. Employers now value flexibility over stability, and increasingly hire employees for short-term or temporary work. Many countries have also repealed labor laws, relaxed employee protections, and reduced state-provided benefits. As the old system of worker protection declines, how can labor regulation be improved to protect workers? In Rethinking Workplace Regulation, nineteen leading scholars from ten countries and half a dozen disciplines present a sweeping tour of the latest policy experiments across the world that attempt to balance worker security and the new flexible employment paradigm. Edited by noted socio-legal scholars Katherine V.W. Stone and Harry Arthurs, Rethinking Workplace Regulation presents case studies on new forms of dispute resolution, job training programs, social insurance and collective representation that could serve as policy models in the contemporary industrialized world. The volume leads with an intriguing set of essays on legal attempts to update the employment contract. For example, Bruno Caruso reports on efforts in the European Union to “constitutionalize” employment and other contracts to better preserve protective principles for workers and to extend their legal impact. The volume then turns to the field of labor relations, where promising regulatory strategies have emerged. Sociologist Jelle Visser offers a fresh assessment of the Dutch version of the ‘flexicurity’ model, which attempts to balance the rise in nonstandard employment with improved social protection by indexing the minimum wage and strengthening rights of access to health insurance, pensions, and training. Sociologist Ida Regalia provides an engaging account of experimental local and regional “pacts” in Italy and France that allow several employers to share temporary workers, thereby providing workers job security within the group rather than with an individual firm. The volume also illustrates the power of governments to influence labor market institutions. Legal scholars John Howe and Michael Rawling discuss Australia's innovative legislation on supply chains that holds companies at the top of the supply chain responsible for employment law violations of their subcontractors. Contributors also analyze ways in which more general social policy is being renegotiated in light of the changing nature of work. Kendra Strauss, a geographer, offers a wide-ranging comparative analysis of pension systems and calls for a new model that offers “flexible pensions for flexible workers.” With its ambitious scope and broad inquiry, Rethinking Workplace Regulation illustrates the diverse innovations countries have developed to confront the policy challenges created by the changing nature of work. The experiments evaluated in this volume will provide inspiration and instruction for policymakers and advocates seeking to improve worker’s lives in this latest era of global capitalism.