Towards an integrated approach for the analysis of gender equity in policies supporting paid work and care responsibilities

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework for analysing the degree to which public policies support gender equity in paid work and care. Combining the distinction between commodification and decommodification and the distinction between defamilialisation, supported familialism, and familialism by default our study identifies a number of relevant policies, ranging from services, leave entitlements, income support measures, and fiscal instruments to forms of acknowledgement of care work in pension systems. Although our main objective is conceptual, we offer a comparative overview of these policies for all of the EU countries, plus Norway. Thus, we provide a preliminary typology of policy approaches.commodification, decommodification, defamilialisation, familialism, gender, social policy

How Does EU Enlargement Affect Social Cohesion?

The enlargement of the European Union in May 2004 by ten new member states bear increasing challenges in creating social cohesion among its citizens and regions. Social cohesion is understood here in a broad sense as a coalescence of European societies in such a way that living conditions and quality of life of its citizens converge. This paper's empirical focus is on the two core life domains that are currently taking center stage in EU policy debates: (1) employment and working conditions and (2) economic resources and social exclusion. The analyses show that the 15 former member states are converging in terms of lliving and work-ing conditions and the situation has improved in all of these countries during the 1990s. With the enlargement the situation becomes more diverse in the enlarged EU. In particular the post-socialist countries have to make great efforts to catch up with their EU counterparts. We can identify three emerging clusters of countries that share empirically very similar living stan-dards. The first, wealthy cluster consists of the old northern European member states. The second, intermediary country group contains the most well-off accession countries and the old Mediterranean member countries with a lower living standard. The third, less developed clus-ter embraces new member states that were former post-communist countries.

Balancing elderly care and employment in Germany

"In this report, we investigate the situation of workers who also care for an elderly parent in Germany. The study is based on qualitative, in depth interviews with care givers who are at least part time employed. The interviews aimed at detecting constrains and resources available to workers with caring responsibilities in the second half of their working life to deal with their multiple responsibilities and demands on their time and attention. This report is one of a series of national reports on the same issue, which are all part of the project 'Workers under pressure and social care' (WOUPS) supported by the French ministry of labour (MIRE) and by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), coordinated by the department of Ecole nationale de la santé publique at the University in Rennes. Towards this project, we also provided a report on the institutional framework of the German long-term care system, which we only synthetically summarize in the first part of this. The outline of the report is as follows: The first section points to the relevance of balancing employment and informal elderly care in Germany and highlights the peculiarities of elderly care compared to child care. The second section, after a synthetic description of the key elements of the German long term care system, presents an overview, based on existing survey data, of the incidence and characteristics of workers having caring responsibilities towards an adult family member in Germany. The third section describes our sample of carers and evaluates its representativity and possible biases. In the fourth section, we discuss different patterns of work/care arrangements. In the fifth chapter, we analyse the tensions arising in these arrangements with regard both to caring and to gainful employment, paying attention to constrains, but also to the - human and emotional - resources carers are able to mobilize in the various situations. In the following two sections, the conciliation, or balancing, perspective is broadened to include family and friendship relationships as well as time for one's own. In the concluding section, we highlight the most crucial aspects which put care givers in employment under pressure and we describe measures that might ease their situation." (author's abstract

Cloning and controlled overexpression of the gene encoding the 35 kDa soluble lytic transglycosylase from Escherichia coli

AbstractThe lytic transglycosylases of Escherichia coli are involved in peptidoglycan metabolism and resemble the lysozymes not only in activity, but in the case of the 70 kDa soluble lytic transglycosylase (Slt70), also structurally. Here we report the cloning of the gene that encodes the 35 kDa soluble lytic transglycosylase (Slt35) of E. coli. Based on the sequence of the full-length gene, Slt35 is very likely to be a proteolytically truncated form of a slightly large protein. The homology between Slt35 and Slt70, albelt poor, indicates that the active site architecture of both proteins may be alike. Using the T-7 promoter system, Slt35 was overproduced in large quantities and purified to homogeneity for crystallographic purposes