Understanding Solidarity and Social Justice: Barriers that Remain

Throughout this volume, it has become clear that solidarity and social justice are necessary elements in addressing social inequalities. Yet historical and emerging societal challenges put solidarity and social justice under pressure. In this final chapter, we outline important conclusions to be drawn from this interdisciplinary look at solidarity and social justice. What do insights into stereotypes and perceptions of welfare state deservingness teach us about solidarity and social justice in contemporary societies? What fault lines are visible, and what fault lines are emerging that require more attention? Most importantly, where do we go from here? This chapter concludes this volume by connecting back to the theoretical foundations underpinning our understandings of solidarity and social justice, while looking forward to societal challenges that lay ahead

Gender Inequality: Perceptions of Fairness and Justice

In this chapter, we consider gender inequality from a social justice framework. The chapter considers gender inequality in paid and unpaid work in relation to distributive, procedural and interactional justice, discussing why this inequality is often perceived to be fair. We then look at whether similar perceptions exist in relation to paid work, focusing on the experience of Australian mothers and their return to work following childbirth. We focus on mothers’ perceptions of the fairness and justice of the flexibility arrangements they often enter into when they return to work. Most mothers view their workplace flexibility arrangements as fair, consistent with a distributive justice framework. Many women also place great importance on interactional justice, particularly in their experiences in negotiating flexibility

Workers’ well-being in the context of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

In this Voices article, we use emerging evidence to reflect on the consequences of Covid-19 for various aspects of workers' wellbeing. This brief review emphasises how COVID-19 exacerbates existing, well-understood inequalities, along the intersections of community, work, and family. Workers on the periphery of the labour market, including non-standard workers and the self-employed, but also women and low-paid workers, are experiencing significant losses in relation to work, working hours and/or wages. Even once the pandemic is contained, its impact will continue to be felt by many communities, workers, and families for months and years to come

A trade-off between the employment of older and younger workers? An historical approach to the political framing and reframing of labour market crowding out in the Dutch welfare state

Against a background of population ageing, rising welfare state costs, and the potential for intergenerational conflict, there is continued belief in the unsubstantiated idea that older and younger workers crowd each other out in the labour market. Taking a longitudinal approach, we historically describe the framing and reframing of the idea of crowding out in Dutch political discourse between 1977–2017. Using a rich dataset of all political party manifestos for this period, we demonstrate the continued belief in employment as a zero-sum game, highlighting how this idea is politically framed and reframed against a backdrop of political and institutional welfare state development. These findings offer empirical evidence on an under-researched topic, providing insights into political and policymaking processes

Reciprocal relationships between time pressure and mental or physical health in Australian mothers of preschool aged children

The associations between time pressure and health are typically conceptualised and examined as unidirectional. This study examined the reciprocal relationships between time pressure and mental and physical health amongst working mothers of preschool children; a high-risk group for feeling time pressured. Using 5 waves of a panel study of Australian mothers when their children were aged 0–4 (n = 3878) and cross-lagged structural equation models, we find strong significant negative reciprocal associations between time pressure and mental and physical health, although these reciprocal associations were stronger and more consistent over time for mental health. Our results indicate that physical health takes a couple of years to deteriorate to a point where the reciprocal effects with time pressure become apparent, but for mental health the reciprocal effects are immediate, present at all time points and consistently strong. Findings suggest there are significant reciprocal health consequences of the time pressure experienced by working mothers and government policy encouraging mothers back into the workforce without adequate supports may be harmful for health

Fathers stepping up? A cross-national comparison of fathers’ domestic labour and parents’ satisfaction with the division of domestic labour during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted work and family life around the world. For parents, this upending meant a potential re-negotiation of the ‘status quo’ in the gendered division of labour. A comparative lens provides extended understandings of changes in fathers’ domestic work based in socio-cultural context–in assessing the size and consequences of change in domestic labour in relation to the type of work-care regime. Using novel harmonized data from four countries (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands) and a work-care regime framework, this study examines cross-national changes in fathers’ shares of domestic labour during the early months of the pandemic and whether these changes are associated with parents’ satisfaction with the division of labour. Results indicate that fathers’ shares of housework and childcare increased early in the pandemic in all countries, with fathers’ increased shares of housework being particularly pronounced in the US. Results also show an association between fathers’ increased shares of domestic labour and mothers’ increased satisfaction with the division of domestic labour in the US, Canada, and the UK. Such comparative work promises to be generative for understanding the pandemic’s imprint on gender relations far into the future

Unequal but balanced : Highly educated mothers’ perceptions of work–life balance during the COVID-19 lockdown in Finland and the Netherlands

One year after the European work–life balance directive, which recognises the need for work–family policy support, measures to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic began shaping parents’ work–life balance in significant ways. Academically, we are challenged to explore whether existing theoretical frameworks hold in this new environment with combined old and new policy frameworks. We are also challenged to understand the nuanced ways in which the first lockdown affects the combination of paid work and care. We address both of these issues, providing a cross-sectional comparative analysis of highly educated mothers’ perceptions of work–life balance during the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland and the Netherlands. Our findings show that highly educated Finnish mothers have more difficulty combining work and care during the first lockdown than Dutch mothers. The absence of state-provided care during the lockdown creates greater difficulty for full-time working Finnish mothers in a dual-earner/state-carer system than an absence of such care in the Dutch one-and-a-half earner system, where most mothers work part time. Further analyses suggest variation in part-time and (nearly) full-time hours mitigates the work–life balance experiences of highly educated Dutch mothers. Additional factors explaining cross-country variation or similarities include the presence of young children and the presence of a partner. We discuss these findings in light of current theoretical frameworks and highlight avenues for future research.acceptedVersionPeer reviewe

A mapping of parenting support policies worldwide to prevent violence against children

BACKGROUND: While recent systematic reviews indicate that parenting interventions reduce negative parenting behaviours, including child maltreatment, only 26 % of governments worldwide indicate that parenting support programs reach all parents in their country. OBJECTIVE: This mapping study investigates which countries have a government policy to provide such parenting support aimed at reducing child-directed violence. SETTING: To analyse parenting support within the broad cultural and historical contexts, this study covers all 194 countries and territories worldwide. METHODS: A systematic stepwise online search was conducted to establish the existence, or not, of a parenting support policy to prevent violence against children and in the case that a policy was identified, the sectoral policy portfolio in which the policy was published. RESULTS: Findings showed that almost half of countries globally have a policy relating to parenting support to prevent child maltreatment. The highest concentration of such policies is in the European, Southeast Asia and Western Pacific Regions and globally parenting support are mainly stand-alone policies or embedded within a child protection policy. CONCLUSIONS: Ideas around parenting support have evolved over time however the link between policy and practice as well as the reality of implementation modalities remains unclear. The translation of policy to practice merits further attention if we want to reach every parent in the world who needs it

The COVID-19 pandemic and temporal change in metabolic risk factors for cardiovascular disease: A natural experiment within the HELIUS study

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, including the restrictive measures taken to reduce the spread of the virus, negatively affected people's health behavior. We explored whether the pandemic also had an effect on metabolic risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) in women and men. We conducted a natural experiment, using data from 6962 participants without CVD at baseline (2011–2015) of six ethnic groups of the HELIUS study in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We studied whether participants whose follow-up measurements were taken within the 11 months before the pandemic (control group) differed from those whose measurements were taken taken within 6 months after the first lockdown (exposed group). Using sex-stratified linear regressions with inverse probability weighting, we compared changes in baseline- and follow-up data between the control and exposed group in six metabolic risk factors: systolic and diastolic blood pressure (SBP, DBP), total cholesterol (TC), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c), and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR). Next, we explored the mediating effect of changes in body-mass index (BMI), alcohol, smoking, depressive symptoms and negative life events at follow-up. We observed less favorable changes in SBP (+1.12mmHg for women, +1.38mmHg for men), DBP (+0.85mmHg, +0.80mmHg) and FPG (only in women, +0.12 mmol/L) over time in the exposed group relative to the control group. Conversely, changes in HbA1c (−0.65 mmol/mol, −0.84 mmol/mol) and eGFR (+1.06 mL/min, +1.04 mL/min) were more favorable in the exposed compared to the control group, respectively. Changes in SBP, DBP, and FPG were partially mediated by changes in behavioral factors, in particular BMI and alcohol consumption. Concluding, the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular behavioral changes associated with restrictive lockdown measures, may have negatively affected several CVD risk factors, in both women and men