WP 17 - Working women's choices for domestic help

Household services are increasing. Which households consume these services, in particular domestic help? This article tests whether time and financial resources influence the use of domestic help, performing logistic regression analyses with the WWIQ-2000/01-data (N=10,969), addressing working women in the Netherlands. The use of paid domestic cleaning services is highly dependent upon a woman’s working hours, supervisory position and hourly wages. It is to a minor extent dependent upon children and partner. Age and high education have a substantial impact. The factors influencing paid domestic help predict neither occasional and unpaid help, nor the number of hours of paid domestic help.

The effects of time-spatial flexibility and new working conditions on employees’ work-life balance

Part-time work, flexible working hours, and home-based teleworking are HR instruments which are used to facilitate reconciliation of work and family life. It can be questioned, however, whether these arrangements really enhance work-life balance. This paper examines whether time-spatial flexibility reduces negative work-home interference, and if so, whether this also holds true for the category of ‘New Employees’ working under so-called ‘New Working Conditions’ which are characterised by professional job autonomy, team working by project, management by objectives, and strict deadlines. Employing survey data collected in 2003 among 807 Dutch employees, it is concluded that time-spatial flexibility does affect the work-life balance of workers positively, also under New Working Conditions. Generally, employees holding a smaller part-time job (12-24 contractual working hours per week) experienced a better work-life balance. In particular, female workers gained from more control over the temporal location of their work. Home-based teleworkers and employees holding larger part-time jobs (25-35 hours per week) did not experience a better work-life balance. In the concluding section, the results of the study are discussed in the context of contemporary Dutch labour market developments