Author: Janet C. Gornick
Publication: Workplace Flexibility: Realigning 20th-Century Jobs to a 21st-Century Workforce. Chapter 11, pp. 223-245
Editors: Kathleen Christensen and Barbara Schneider
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Date: 2010
Excerpt:
Two facts vividly capture the situation of American employees compared to their counterparts in a number of other Western countries. The first fact is that American employees, on average, spend many more hours per year at their workplaces (see figure 11.1). In 2002, workers in the United States–men and women combined—averaged over 1,800 hours per year spent in paid work, compared to, for example, just over 1,700 in the United Kingdom, fewer than 1,600 in Belgium and Sweden, and fewer than 1,500 in France, Germany, and the Netherlands (Mishel, Bernstein, and Allegretto 2005). The second fact is that American workplaces are much less regulated than work-places in most European countries. As a result, employees in the United States lack multiple legal rights that are in place elsewhere, including the right to be subject to a maximum number of hours worked per week, the right to a minimum number of paid days off, the right to be protected from pay discrimination if they work part-time, the right to formally request a change in their work hours, and the right to take paid family leave to temporarily care for dependents. This chapter provides an overview of selected public policies that shape working time as of approximately 2002 in six European countries: Belgium, France. Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, compared to those in place in the United States. The six comparison countries were selected to en-sure a degree of cross-national diversity. Although these countries have much in common—they are all high-income countries and all members of the Europear Union—they also represent diverse welfare state models. Comparative social policy scholars have long classified the Belgian, French, and German systems as ex-emplars of the conservative model, in which public provisions generally replicate market outcomes (see, e.g., Esping-Andersen 1990).
Link: Limiting Working Time and Supporting Flexibility for Employees: Public Policy Lessons from Europe