Volte-Face on the Welfare State: Social Partners, Knowledge Economies, and the Expansion of Work-Family Policies

Øyvind Søraas Skorge,Magnus Bergli Rasmussen

doi:10.1177/00323292211014371

Øyvind Søraas Skorge, Magnus Bergli Rasmussen

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https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211014371

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Journal: Politics & Society	Publication Date: May 19, 2021
Citations: 6	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Oslo Nye Høyskole

Abstract

To what extent organized employers and trade unions support social policies is contested. This article examines the case of work-family policies (WFPs), which have surged to become a central part of the welfare state. In that expansion, the joint role of employers and unions has largely been disregarded in the comparative political economy literature. The article posits that the shift from Fordist to knowledge economies is the impetus for the social partners’ support for WFPs. If women make up an increasing share of high-skilled employees, employers start favoring WFPs to increase their labor supply. Similarly, unions favor WFPs if women constitute a significant part of their membership base. Yet the extent to which changes in preferences translate into policy depends on the presence of corporatist institutions. These claims are supported with statistical analyses of WFPs in eighteen advanced democracies across five decades and an in-depth case study of Norway. The article thus demonstrates that the trajectory of the new welfare state is decisively affected by the preferences and power of unions and employers.

Highlights

To what extent organized employers and trade unions support social policies is contested
In the large-N analysis, we show that the reversal of the gender gap in higher education and the rise of women within unions are clearly associated with the expansion of work-family policies (WFPs) in countries with centralized social partners but not in countries where these are weak and fragmented
We propose that the preferences of employers toward WFPs depend on the gender gap in higher education as well as the level of corporatism

Summary

Introduction

To what extent organized employers and trade unions support social policies is contested. By spelling out the mechanisms for employers’ and unions’ changing preferences for WFPs, this article illustrates that analyses emphasizing and questioning employers’ proactive role in welfare state development can offer complementary rather than competing explanations.[11] Among skeptics, Korpi asserts that “employercentered research has not yet presented empirical evidence indicating that employers have been protagonists with first-order preferences for major reforms extending social citizenship rights.”[12] The advocates, on the other hand, document how employers’ associations have had an active hand in the extension of key social policies, such as active labor market policies.[13] Our analysis shows that these two approaches can be squared by allowing social partners’ preferences to vary over time according to the composition of the labor force.[14]

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