Trade Unions and Work‐life Balance: Changing Times in France and the UK?
| Author | Abigail Gregory,Susan Milner |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2008.00710.x |
| Date | 01 March 2009 |
| Published date | 01 March 2009 |
Trade Unions and Work-life Balance:
Changing Times in France and the UK?
Abigail Gregory and Susan Milner
Abstract
The mixed empirical findings to date have indicated that some, but not all,
unions in industrialized countries are actively involved in campaigning and
bargaining around work–life balance (WLB) issues, as part of a modernization
agenda linked to feminization and to ‘positive flexibility’. This article seeks to
identify factors that might encourage or inhibit trade unions from involvement
in WLB issues, within a cross-national comparative perspective focusing on two
countries (France and the UK) that have contrasting working time regimes and
approaches to WLB. It draws on original research carried out in two sectors —
insurance and social work — in these two countries. The article links the
emergence of union WLB programmes and bargaining agendas to gender-
equality concerns within the union and to the gender composition of the sector,
as well as to the working time regime, including the mode of action, partnership
being a significant corollary of WLB campaigning in the UK. We find support
for the modernization thesis in the UK, particularly in the public sector, but
within severe constraints defined by employer initiative.
1. Introduction
Work–life balance1(WLB) has become the focus of growing public and
policy interest, both internationally and within the EU, in the context of
socio-demographic changes, in particular, increased female labour market
participation, and of business objectives concerning employees’ performance
and productivity.
Within the EU the policy interest in ‘reconciliation of work and family’ has
directly generated measures at both EU and nation-state level, such as the
EU directives on parental leave and part-time work and the EU Council
of Ministers’ resolution of 29 June 2000, calling for the development of
paternity leave. In EU social policy, exhortation has also come for social
partners to negotiate the modernization of working time to generate ‘positive
Abigail Gregory is at the University of Salford. Susan Milner is at the University of Bath.
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2008.00710.x
47:1 March 2009 0007–1080 pp. 122–146
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
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flexibility’, that is, to say the ‘synchronization of employer and employee time
needs...contributing to sustainable work-life balance policies for employ-
ees as well as a high performance workplace’ (Morris and Pillinger 2007:
208). In addition, the EU’s focus on promoting gender equality (notably
through its Framework Strategy for Gender Equality and through the intro-
duction of ‘gender mainstreaming’ in policy design and evaluation) has also
strongly implicated the social partners in its realization and has, to varying
degrees, fed into national legislation and collective agreements in the area of
WLB (Demetriades et al. 2006; Kirton and Greene 2005). Trade union
involvement in the implementation of WLB policies corresponds to a shift
from hard law to soft law and to concerns around implementation of such
policies (Hantrais 2000).
In the USA, the UK and many other countries where there is public policy
interest in WLB, trade unions have been considered to have an important
role to play in improving workplace provision for employees. For instance,
the UK’s Women and Work Commission, reporting in February 2006, rec-
ommended that ‘Trade unions should train their representatives to promote
the benefits of flexible working options and win hearts and minds among
management and employees for best practice policies and procedures to
monitor the right to request flexible working’ (Women and Work Commis-
sion 2006: 7).
Conflicting views have been voiced about the role of trade unions in
relation to developing the WLB agenda. Some have seen them as being only
weakly committed to WLB policies and barely present in the process of
introducing them in the workplace (Hantrais and Ackers 2005). Two broad
reasons are advanced to explain unions’ apparent lack of investment in
WLB policies: first, such policies are seen as ‘women’s’ issues and as such
clash with masculine cultures of male-dominated unions (Dickens et al.
1988); second, WLB measures typically encompass flexible working, which
poses challenges as it is often seen by unions as a removal of collective,
protective rights, and is usually employer led rather than employee or trade
union led (Ackers 2002; Colling and Dickens 2001; Kirton and Greene
2006). Fleetwood (2007) suggests that the WLB agenda has been driven by
business concerns that effectively disguise employer-friendly measures in an
employee-friendly discourse.
The definition of ‘flexible working’ is, of itself, highly ambiguous, as it can
comprise a range of organizational strategies including, for example, func-
tional, contractual, numerical, financial and geographical flexibility, each
differing in the extent to which the flexibility solely benefits employers or is of
mutual benefit to employees and employers (Lewis and Cooper 2005: 3).
Flexibility in working time can be ‘employee-friendly’ flexibility, such as
term-time working, job-sharing, flexi-time and parental leave and enhance
WLB, but it can also be ‘employer-friendly’ and comprise practices such as
zero-hour contracts, on-call systems and shift working, which tend to render
it harder to balance paid work and other commitments. A number of forms
of flexible working (e.g. annualized working, homeworking and part-time
Trade Unions and Work–Life Balance 123
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2009.
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