Margarita León

‘Social Investment’ or Back to ‘Familism’: The Impact of the Economic Crisis on Family and Care Policies in Italy and Spain

Family policies have traditionally been weak in Southern Europe. In the last two decades, however, and following a ‘catching up’ course, Spain has created new family programmes and expanded existing ones. Meanwhile, the picture for Italy during the years preceding the crisis is more of a ‘frozen landscape’. However, the diverging paths of the two countries in terms of policy reform in the years preceding the crisis do not place them in substantially different positions. The economic crisis and the austerity measures that followed have aggravated the weaknesses of family and care policies in both countries.

A real job? Regulating household work: The case of Spain

This article is contextualized within the recent evolution of household employment in Spain. In the context of the strong demand for personal care services – due to rapid population ageing, mass incorporation of women into the labour market and insufficient collective provision of care services – the growth of domestic work is closely related to the overall social organization of care and specific migration policies that have eased, both implicitly and explicitly, the labour supply of foreign women into Spanish households. In line with ongoing debates in the academic literature as well as in the political sphere, this article seeks to explain the extent to which domestic work can or should be considered as any other job in terms of social and employment rights and obligations. To that end, it evaluates changes in the regulation of household employment in Spain since the creation of the Special Regime for Household Employees (SRHE) in 1969 until the most recent 2011 reform. Following the recommendations of the ILO Convention for Domestic Workers (2011), this latest reform puts domestic workers on equal footing with other dependent employees. It thus implies a sea change in relation to the discriminatory treatment embedded in previous legal frameworks. The main hindrance to the effective transposition of the norm however remains the strong presence of the informal economy and a dubious political commitment to ensure its application.

Welfare Rescaling in Italy and Spain: Political Strategies to Deal with Harsh Austerity:

By looking at the main welfare state reforms undertaken by the Italian and Spanish governments since the outbreak of the financial crisis, this article explores changes resulting from the implementation of austerity policies. In light of the way in which unpopular fiscal adjustment measures have been introduced in both countries, especially since 2010, we call for a revision of the existing literature on welfare retrenchment and political strategies. We argue in this article that under conditions of ‘permanent strain’, bold retrenchment policies and cuts in social spending have been justified by the Italian and Spanish governments through a ‘there is no alternative’ or TINA legitimation strategy, which creates limited interaction space between social and political actors. We tentatively conclude that this political strategy does not entirely fit the notions of blame avoidance or credit claiming as currently formulated in the specialist literature. We call for further empirical testing of the arguments made in this paper.

Towards the individualization of social rights: Hidden familialistic practices in Spanish social policy

Abstract The article evaluates how gender issues have been conceptualized in the development and consolidation of Spanish social policy and specifically, in the social protection system. Transformations in social policy from the Franco regime to the present have been informed by shifts in the understanding of familialism, considered as a dimension of variation in social provision centred on the family and womens unpaid work. Conservative-corporatist in its origins, the Spanish welfare state initially displayed features of a typical male-breadwinner model. Since democratization, there have been significant moves away from the original type, with many changes driven by concerns for gender equality. Familialism, no longer the ideology behind welfare policies, is reinforced in practice through certain welfare programmes, chiefly the social security system, and persists at the level of social organization. Spanish ‘familialism’ is distinctively different from the continental model but remarkably consistent with that of other south European countries.

Social innovation, reciprocity and contentious politics: Facing the socio-urban crisis in Ciutat Meridiana, Barcelona:

Taking one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Barcelona as a paradigmatic case, the aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which contestation organised by sublocal grassroots movements in the context of the current urban crisis operates, both in terms of content and form of protest. Our thesis is that resident mobilisation in the neighbourhood of Ciutat Meridiana is expressive of a new cycle of (urban) social mobilisations in Spanish cities. In such mobilisations, more or less spontaneous initiatives which emerged to counteract the effects of the crisis at the community level are simultaneously serving as platforms for reciprocity and political contestation. Establishing a dialogue with the literature on social innovation, in this paper we claim that these micro-local urban practices are linked to broader social movements and thus play a fundamental role in the political empowerment of citizens living in highly segregated and vulnerable urban areas.

Resisting Crisis at What Cost? Migrant Care Workers in Private Households

In recent years there has been an increase of care work in private households. As has been widely shown in recent research in Europe the expansion of the household sector has been particularly strong in Southern European countries and this expansion has largely depended on migrant labour (Leon, 2010; Lutz, 2008). The strength of this new trend at the beginning of the century prompted Francesca Bettio and others to proclaim a shift in Southern Europe from a ‘familialistic’ to a ‘migrant-in-the-family’ model of care (Bettio et al., 2006). The reasons for this have been widely reported (Rubio, 2003; Bettio et al., 2006; Simonazzi, 2009; Leon and Migliavacca, 2013). On the demand side, three of the most important factors behind this growth of care-related work in the household sector are population ageing, rapid incorporation of women to the labour market and insufficient state support to cover increasing demand for care provision.

Early Childhood Education and Care Provision in Spain

This chapter looks at the evolution of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) provision in Spain since the beginning of the 1990s. The main objective is to understand the way in which the introduction of three years of pre-school (for children aged three to six) within the national education system has had an impact on the quality of the provision and the working conditions of professionals. The chapter also compares this progression of ECEC for the over three children with ECEC for the under threes. Here, the main question is if the development of a whole new sector of welfare in Spain could offer a structural opportunity for a large number of good jobs and contribute to reversing or at least cushioning some of the Spanish prevalent shortcomings in employment, which was the case with the extension of public education in the 1980s and 1990s; or if, on the other hand, there are trends and risks that set the main lines of causality the other way around.

From Austerity to Permanent Strain? The European Union and Welfare State Reform in Italy and Spain

This chapter makes a comparative analysis of the trajectories of welfare change in Italy and Spain since the outbreak of the financial crisis. We look at the differences in the types of institutional design to study welfare reform in these two countries and assess how recent changes have affected welfare state institutions. This chapter also assesses the level of the European Union (EU) involvement through formal instruments around the European Semester as well as by the means of agreements with the Troika and the European Central Bank (ECB). For this part of the analysis, three sets of documents have been used: Commission Recommendations and Council Decisions in relation to Excessive Deficit Procedures (EDP); Commission country-specific Recommendations based on Stability or Convergence Programmes, and Policy Measures to boost growth and jobs (National Reform Programmes). These documents allow an analysis of the contents of formal adjustment pressures. Other documents and sources (including newspaper articles) have also been analysed to look at the role of conditionality and ‘backroom’ diplomacy.

When flexibility meets familialism: Two tales of gendered labour markets in Spain and South Korea

Korea and Spain share crucial labour market and welfare state characteristics that converge to produce similar outcomes: strongly dualized labour markets, weak social protection, and features that are archetypical of familialist states. Labour market flexibility in both countries has recently increased through unusually high levels of temporary employment. Yet, when we analyse female labour force participation, we observe a significant divergence: Korean women interrupt their participation in the labour market when they are of childbearing age, while Spanish women do not. Furthermore, the level of education of women in Spain matters for their career prospects, but in Korea, it does not. In this article, we explore the causes of this divergence by analysing (1) structural characteristics of the labour market, (2) policies that facilitate the reconciliation of work and family and (3) gender equality politics. We argue that the combination of these three factors have different impacts on the career choices of women in Spain and Korea. Some aspects of working culture – long working hours in particular – the unavailability to women of good quality jobs and a high gender pay gap contribute towards labour market interruption of highly educated women in Korea when they have children. Policy developments have been important in the two countries, but high levels of childcare investment in Korea have not improved female employment prospects. Furthermore, we observe greater political commitment to gender equality in Spain than in Korea. Fundamental changes in the Spanish political culture, which were the result of a combination of domestic and supranational dynamics, played a major role in the political endorsement of gender equality and a rejection of familialistic policies and practices.

Cross-national Variations in Care and Care as a Labour Market

The main aim of this chapter is to provide contextual cross-national background information on changes in care policies in a selected number of European countries that will be of relevance for the development of the overriding analytical framework of this volume as well as for setting up the grounds for comparison of national case studies. The chapter is divided into three main parts. The first part looks at trends in coverage and expenditure for early child care and education (ECEC) and long-term care (LTC) programmes in Europe over the last decade. The second part offers an overview of the main institutional set-ups for ECEC and LTC. The third and final part studies care as a labour market. Using data from the EU-Labour Force Survey and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this third part analyses the care workforce in terms of occupations and professions and their working conditions.