National-Level Family Policies and workers’ Access to Schedule Control in a European Comparative Perspective: Crowding Out or In, and for Whom?

Dualization and the access to occupational family‐friendly working‐time arrangements across Europe

“…Following from this, we could expect not only better access, but also a smaller division between insiders and outsiders in the access to family‐friendly WTAs in countries with generous family policies. On the other hand, Chung () provides evidence to show that generous national‐level family policies, especially work‐facilitating policies (see also, Korpi et al, ; Misra, Budig, & Boeckmann, ) such as childcare provision, “crowd‐in” occupational welfare, but not equally for all workers. Rather, companies seem to target the more profitable workers, given their added incentive of keeping and recruiting these workers, resulting in a larger division between insiders and outsiders in countries with generous family policies.…”

“…Empirically, numerous studies show that high-skilled and higher-educated workers are most likely to have access to flexible WTAs (Brescoll, Glass, & Sedlovskaya, 2013;Golden, 2009;Ortega, 2009;Seeleib-Kaiser & Fleckenstein, 2009). Workers in disadvantaged positions-e.g., low wage, low-skilled, lower educated-are least likely to have such access (e.g., Chung, 2017a;Golden, 2009;Swanberg et al, 2005;Wiß, 2017). Similarly, those with fixed-term contracts have also been shown to have less access to flexible WTAs (Präg & Mills, 2014), although other studies say there are no significant differences (Chung, 2017a).…”

“…Companies may provide additional arrangements to ensure the recruitment and maintenance of workers with additional family demands, as well as to maintain workers' loyalty and commitment (Dex & Scheibl, ; Wood, De Menezes, & Lasaosa, ). The use of such occupational policies may be performance‐driven (Ortega, ), resulting in the stratification within organizations in the access workers get to family‐friendly policies (Chung, ; Lambert & Haley‐Lock, ). In other words, employers may only provide family‐friendly policies to the select few that employers expect a return from (Swanberg, Pitt‐Catsouphes, & Drescher‐Burke, ) or those they are willing to keep/recruit (Wood et al, ).…”

‘Women’s work penalty’ in access to flexible working arrangements across Europe

“…In addition to direct impact of national level policies, institutional theories (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) argue that national institutions can change corporate culture and policies, which can influence who has access to flexible working arrangement indirectly. More specifically, national level family policies have been shown to explain worker's access to schedule control and the access gap in schedule control between different groups of workers (den Dulk et al, 2013;Chung, 2017); workers in countries with generous family policies are more likely to have access to schedule control, yet this positive effect is stronger for certain groups of workers -those in higher occupations, or working in public sectors and in large companies. Furthermore, it has also been shown that the influence of schedule control on individual's perception of time adequacy between work and family life depends on the gender of the worker and on the national context (Lott, 2015).…”

“…One reason for this is because of rather than the gender dominance of the occupations, occupational levels may be more important in its representation of the skill levels of the job. Previous studies (e.g., Chung, 2017;Wiß, 2016) show that the occupational level of the worker, in relations to high vs low-skilled occupations, is the most important determinant explaining access to flexible working arrangements. Thus, the fact that many of the higher occupational level jobs are equally represented (e.g., (associate) professionals) or female dominated (clerks and service and sales workers), may explain for the contradictory findings in the previous models.…”