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Institute
Cross-national variation in the relationship between welfare generosity and single mother employment
(2022)
Reform of the U.S. welfare system in 1996 spurred claims that cuts to welfare programs effectively incentivized single mothers to find employment. It is difficult to assess the veracity of those claims, however, absent evidence of how the relationship between welfare benefits and single mother employment generalizes across countries. This study combines data from the European Union Labour Force Survey and the U.S. Current Population Survey (1992-2015) into one of the largest samples of single mothers ever, testing the relationships between welfare generosity and single mothers’ employment and work hours. We find no consistent evidence of a negative relationship between welfare generosity and single mother employment outcomes. Rather, we find tremendous cross-national heterogeneity, which does not clearly correspond to well-known institutional variations. Our findings demonstrate the limitations of single country studies and the pervasive, salient interactions between institutional contexts and social policies.
This study examines how public policies affect parents' preferences for a more egalitarian division of paid and unpaid work. Based on the assumption that individuals develop their preferences within a specific policy context, we examine how changes in three policies affect mothers' and fathers' work-family preferences: the availability of high-quality, affordable childcare; the right to return to a full-time job after having reduced hours to part-time and an increase in the number of 'partner months' in parental leave schemes. Analysing a unique probability sample of parents with young children in Germany from 2015 (N = 1756), we find that fathers would want to work slightly fewer hours if they had the right to return to a full-time position after working part-time, and mothers would want to work slightly more hours if childcare opportunities were improved. Full-time working parents, moreover, are found to prefer fewer hours independent of the policy setting, while non-employed parents would like to work at least some hours. Last but not least, our analyses show that increasing the number of partner months in the parental leave scheme considerably increases fathers' preferences for longer and mothers' preferences for shorter leave. Increasing the number of partner months in parental schemes hence has the greatest potential to increase gender equality.
Wie hat sich die COVID-19 Pandemie auf geschlechtsspezifische Ungleichheiten im Arbeitsleben und dem subjektiven Wohlbefinden Erwerbstätiger ausgewirkt? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage analysiert dieser Beitrag drei Wellen einer nicht zufallsbasierten Onlinestichprobe für den Zeitraum Mitte März bis Anfang August 2020 und umfassen damit den Zeitraum des ersten Lockdowns. Die Ergebnisse unserer multivariaten Analysen zeigen: Frauen, Eltern und insbesondere Mütter waren überdurchschnittlich von Arbeitszeitreduzierungen betroffen. Bei der Wahrscheinlichkeit im Homeoffice zu arbeiten gab es nur geringfügige Unterschiede nach Geschlecht und Familiensituation. Die Zufriedenheit mit der Arbeit, dem Familienleben und dem Leben insgesamt ging bei Frauen, Eltern und insbesondere Müttern überproportional stark zurück. Die beobachteten Unterschiede verringern sich gegen Ende des Lockdowns wieder, jedoch unterschiedlich stark für die einzelnen Ergebnisdimensionen.
Work has become more precarious in recent years. Although this claim is more or less uncontested among social scientists, there are a still many questions that have not yet been conclusively answered. What exactly constitutes precariousness? How should it be operationalized and measured? How does the character of precarious employment vary across organizations, occupations, demographic groups, and countries?
The edited volume by Arne Kalleberg and Steven Vallas seeks to provide answers to these and related questions. Sociologists from around the world employed different methodologies in a broad range of economic sectors and countries to identify the origins, manifestations, and consequences of precarious work. The different contributions not only illustrate the great heterogeneity that exists within precarious employment but also point to some central features of precarious work independent of the geographical context in which it occurs. Moreover, they highlight some challenges for the study of precarious work.
First, drawing on their earlier work, Kalleberg and Vallas conceptualize precarious employment as work that is characterized by uncertainty and insecurity with regard to pay and the stability of the work arrangement; workers in precarious jobs only have limited access to social benefits and statutory protections and bear the entrepreneurial risk of the employment relationship. This broad definition not only captures various forms of nonstandard employment, such as temporary employment, part-time work, or one-person businesses, but also covers informal workers or workers who are at risk of losing their jobs. Nonetheless, this definition does not seem to be broad enough or specific enough to fit the needs of all types of research and to appropriately capture the multifaceted nature of precarious work. Kiersztyn, for example, shows the necessity to distinguish between objective and subjective insecurities when measuring precarious work. Likewise, Rogan et al. point out that the concept of “precarious employment” has little resonance in the developing world, where most of the workforce is at or near poverty and informal work is the default employment type.
Second, the book repeatedly illustrates that the increase in precarious work can be attributed to the rise of neoliberal doctrines and practices, the deinstitutionalization of organized workers, and the dismantling of the welfare state. This applies not only to the United States, where market logics have often been equated with economic freedom, but also to countries like Germany with its corporatist tradition and a strong welfare state (Brady and Biegert) as well as to emerging economies like India (Sapkal and Sundar). In the opening chapter, Pulignano, moreover, convincingly argues that the institutional determinants of precariousness should not only be sought at the national level but that the supranational context plays a major role when it comes to explain precarity.
Third, by focusing on different aspects of precariousness and employment, the book shows the need for differentiation when studying precarious work. This is nicely illustrated by the following three chapters, which draw different conclusions on the gendered nature of precarious employment. Wallace and Kwak study the rise of “bad jobs” in U.S. metropolitan areas and show that men’s work became more precarious during the Great Financial Crisis. By contrast, Banch and Hanley, who have investigated the prevalence of different forms of nonstandard work since the 1980s in the United States, show that the risk of working in precarious jobs has declined over time for men. Likewise, Witteveen shows that the employment trajectories of young men are less precarious than those of young women in the United States. These seemingly contradictory claims stem from the fact that the authors focused on different aspects of precariousness, used different methodologies and datasets, and took on slightly different populations and time frames. The work on precarious work is hence not yet done.
Fourth, precarious work is certainly no longer a characteristic of those with low levels of education but has increasingly become common among professional and technical workers as well. It might come in disguise and is oftentimes perceived as an opportunity, a means for career advancement, and a personal choice. These disguises and perceptions are evident in chapters by Zukin and Papadantonakis on the unpaid work performed by programmers in hackathons, the chapter by Rao on young professionals in international organizations, and to some degree also the chapter by Williams on professional female workers in the oil and gas industry.
These insights (and more that are not mentioned here) make the book relevant and interesting to read. A summary chapter to synthesize the diverse findings and potentially also outline some of the methodological challenges in the study of precarious work would have had been a nice close of the book. Furthermore, such a summation would have been the place to speculate about the consequences of recent changes in the world of work, such as the rise of the gig economy and cloud or crowd work, which add new forms of precarity to the ones that we have known thus far.
Although it has primarily been written for an academic audience, the book is a highly commendable and enjoyable read for both social scientists and practitioners such as labor activists, human resources managers, and policy makers. Moreover, the book is certainly a valuable teaching resource suitable for graduate and master’s seminars in sociology due to its broad coverage of various aspects of precariousness, geographical regions, and methodological approaches.
Although observational studies from many countries have consistently shown that motherhood negatively affects women's wages, experimental findings on its effect on the likelihood of being hired are less conclusive. Motherhood penalties in hiring have been reported in the United States, the prototypical liberal market economy, but not in Sweden, the prototypical social-democratic welfare state. Based on a field experiment in Germany, this study examines the effects of parenthood on hiring processes in the prototypical conservative welfare state. My findings indicate that job recruitment processes indeed penalize women but not men for having children. In addition to providing theoretical explanations for why motherhood penalties in hiring are particularly likely to occur in the German context, this study also highlights several methodological and practical issues that should be considered when conducting correspondence studies to examine labour market discrimination.
How can labour market institutions make workers confident about their economic future? While quantitative studies have repeatedly shown that countries’ labour market regulations and policies are related to variations in workers’ perceived job security, these studies did not explain how these institutions affect workers’ perceptions and expectations. This study seeks to close this gap by analysing qualitative interview data collected on employees in Germany and the U.S. during the great financial crisis (2009–2010). The study's main finding is that policies vary in their effectiveness at making workers feel secure about their jobs. While unemployment assistance can reduce workers’ worries about job loss, dismissal protection does not seem to effectively increase workers’ confidence that their jobs are secure. Overall, employees know relatively little about the policies and regulations that are meant to protect them and have limited trust in their effectiveness. Individual and organisational characteristics seem to be more relevant for employees’ feelings of job security than national-level policies. In particular, comparisons with others who have lower levels of protection increase workers’ perceived security. These insights are particularly important in light of the ongoing changes in the world of work that are making workers’ lives more uncertain and insecure.
Drawing on three waves of survey data from a non-probability sample from Germany, this paper examines two opposing expectations about the pandemic's impacts on gender equality: The optimistic view suggests that gender equality has increased, as essential workers in Germany have been predominantly female and as fathers have had more time for childcare. The pessimistic view posits that lockdowns have also negatively affected women's jobs and that mothers had to shoulder the additional care responsibilities. Overall, our exploratory analyses provide more evidence supporting the latter view. Parents were more likely than non-parents to work fewer hours during the pandemic than before, and mothers were more likely than fathers to work fewer hours once lockdowns were lifted. Moreover, even though parents tended to divide childcare more evenly, at least temporarily, mothers still shouldered more childcare work than fathers. The division of housework remained largely unchanged. It is therefore unsurprising that women, in particular mothers, reported lower satisfaction during the observation period. Essential workers experienced fewer changes in their working lives than respondents in other occupations.
This paper examines and discusses the biases and pitfalls of retrospective survey questions that are currently being used in many medical, epidemiological, and sociological studies on the COVID-19 pandemic. By analyzing the consistency of answers to retrospective questions provided by respondents who participated in the first two waves of a survey on the social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, we illustrate the insights generated by a large body of survey research on the use of retrospective questions and recall accuracy.
This article draws on the experience from an ongoing research project employing respondent-driven sampling (RDS) to survey (illicit) 24-hour home care workers. We highlight issues around the preparatory work and the fielding of the survey to provide researchers with useful insights on how to implement RDS when surveying populations for which the method has not yet been used. We conclude the article with ethical considerations that occur when employing RDS.