The EU’s Work-Life Balance Directive: A Lost Opportunity for the UK in Gender Equality?
Caroline de la Porte, Trine Larsen and Dorota Szelewa
Adequate leave policies can enable men and women to combine labour market participation and childrearing responsibilities. The European Union’s work-life-balance directive (WLBD)—a revision and renaming (2019/1158) of the parental leave directive from 2010—aims to facilitate the combination of work and family life, especially promoting the involvement of fathers / secondary carers in care activities in the private sphere.
There are major gaps in the UK’s work-life balance policy, which could have been addressed via the WLBD, were the UK still an EU member state. These include earmarked parental leave, which, if accompanied by generous replacement rates, often leads to fathers / secondary carers becoming more engaged in childrearing responsibilities. This, in turn, improves the likelihood of retaining women in the labour market, as well as having equalising effects in other areas, such as old-age pensions.
The policies introduced by the WLBD are: ten days of paternity leave, to be paid at minimum at the level of sick pay ; two months of earmarked parental leave, to be compensated at a level decided by member states ; five carer days per parent per year and possibilities for flexible work arrangements. While all are relevant to work-life balance, some have more long-term, gender-equalising potential than others.
Parental leave
In the UK, fathers do have paid paternity of two weeks, with a statutory, flat-rate compensation which is relatively low (£151.20 or €167 a week). In addition to the flat rate, some British companies and public sector employers provide a top-up, so fathers receive full wage compensation during the ten days of leave. This helps explain why take-up is relatively high. Yet such a period of paternity leave is too short to have a long-lasting effect on gender equalisation (O’Brien et al, 2019). On this, the UK is however in sync with the directive.
Two months of earmarked, paid parental leave per parent does have high potential to have a long-term gender-equalising effect on female labour-market participation and on the sharing of care responsibilities. As noted in the preamble to the directive, ‘Member States that provide a significant portion of parental leave to fathers and that pay the worker a payment or allowance during that leave at a relatively high replacement rate, experience a higher take-up rate by fathers and a positive trend in the rate of employment of mothers.’
By contrast, if parental leave is long but unpaid, the earmarking will make little difference in terms of gender equalisation in the private sphere, because mothers / primary carers are more likely to take the leave. In the UK, parents have the right to take 18 weeks of unpaid parental leave for each child but not more than four weeks per child per calendar year. Take-up of parental leave is, unsurprisingly, very low in the UK, because it is unpaid (O’Brien et al, 2019).
In countries with different welfare-state and labour-market regimes, such as Denmark and Poland, preliminary implementation plans regarding earmarked leave include generous pay—80 per cent or full wage compensation (de la Porte et al, 2020). In the UK, there are some signs of timid commitment to increasing fathers’ take-up of parental leave through the enhancement of ‘use-it-or-loose-it’ entitlements, similar to the WLBD provisions on earmarked parental leave (House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee, 2018). However, without formal commitment to amend the legislation, which would have been required with the WLBD, such recommendations and guidelines lack teeth and are unlikely to have an impact.
Carer days
Five yearly unpaid carer days per worker should enable parents to combine work with care responsibilities, although if carer days are paid then the gender-equalising potential is higher. Research shows that the parent with the more generous leave scheme takes time off from work when children are ill (Larsen, 2004). While carer days represent a cost to employers, the state or social insurance, the coronavirus crisis, with the focus on containing infections, has highlighted their importance.
In the UK, carers only have rights to unpaid emergency leave, via transposition of the EU’s parental-leave directive (96/34/EC). The current and previous Conservative administrations have aimed to introduce five unpaid carer days—it was a Conservative pledge in the 2019 election. In March 2020, the government initiated a consultation on the proposal. Thus far, British trade unions and carers’ organisations have welcomed the initiative and even called for more generous rights, such as ten paid carer days per year. The National Health Service employers’ organisation has also been positive while fearing low take-up if the leave is unpaid.
There is however no guarantee that the consultation will lead to an equivalent legal act to the WLBD, as successive governments have attempted, but with limited success, to introduce unpaid carers’ leave in the past, as with the Carers (Leave entitlement) Bill tabled in 2016. The WLBD could have guaranteed more generous carer rights to parents, even if unpaid, if the UK were still an EU member state.
Flexible work
Flexible working arrangements, including working from distance, could benefit men and women, particularly if they live far from their working places. With the onset of the coronavirus crisis, flexibility in working arrangements is accelerating, even if the level of regulation does not yet fully capture the new practices. From the perspective of work-life balance, flexibility in work arrangements can be gender-equalising, if both parents work flexibly. It can however reinforce gender inequalities, if the primary carer needs to combine childrearing at home with work responsibility, such as during the lockdown in the spring of 2020.
In the UK, flexibilisation of work is well institutionalised and the UK is at the forefront in this area. In 2002, all parents with children under six gained the right to request flexible working—extended to other carers in 2006 and to all workers in 2014. Employers can only refuse an employee request for flexible working if they ‘have a good business reason for doing so’.
Take-up of flexible working is widespread in the UK but there are concerns among policy-makers that this flexibility predominantly favours employers, rather than parents, leading to a government consultation process on the topic in December 2019. Considering the WLBD, it is unfortunate that the good practices in flexible-work policy in the UK are not exchanged with EU member states, which are struggling with similar challenges.
WLBD
In the UK, as in other European countries, there is political interest in work-life balance policy, although the British focus is on flexible work and carer days, rather than paid, earmarked parental leave, which would represent a considerable cost to employers and/or the state. The former prime minister, Theresa May, had been minister of women and equalities from 2010 to 2012 and was thus familiar with EU labour law and gender-equalising policies. As part of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement, she planned to implement the WLBD in parallel UK legislation but for her successor, Boris Johnson, mimicking newer EU directives was not a priority. If the UK were (still) an EU member state, the WLBD, especially paid, earmarked parental leave, could have a positive impact.
Research indicates that the WLBD has mobilised new coalitions among national stakeholders with shifting positions, especially towards earmarked parental leave. This is most notable in the employer camp, where European employers’ initial opposition towards the WLBD has been replaced by favourable attitudes and led to progress on paid, earmarked parental leave in some countries (de La Porte et al, 2020). In this way, the WLBD will seemingly put member states on a level playing-field in gender-equalising policies. It is the combination of various policies that is likely to lead to improvements in gender equality—including paternity leave, earmarked parental leave, carer days and flexible work arrangements across member states.
Even if the UK is debating parental leave, carer days and the improvement of working arrangements, the outcome is uncertain. By leaving the EU, it risks losing out on the possibility to improve these policies, and others, which are important for gender equalisation—in particular paid, earmarked parental leave.
References
de la Porte, C, T Larsen and D Szelewa (2020), ‘The work-life balance directive: towards a gender equalizing EU regulatory welfare state? Denmark and Poland compared’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 691
House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee (2018), Fathers and the Workplace, London: House of Commons
Larsen, TP (2004), ‘Work and care strategies of European families: similarities or national differences?’, Social Policy & Administration 38, 6: 654-77
O'Brien, M, J Atkinson and A Koslowski (2019), ‘United Kingdom country note’, in A Koslowski, S Blum, I Dobrotić, A Macht and P Moss (eds), International Review of Leave Policies and Research 2019, International Network on Leave Policies and Research