The struggle to reconcile precarious employment and family life

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

Abstract

The issues of ‘precarious parents’ is not about juggling family responsibilities and the insecurity of the job (and therefore of the income), but it is about the mismatch between a series of very useful activities that these parents do (at home and for work) and the conditions for the (monetary) valorisation of these activities.
So, in my view, conventional work-life balance (work and family reconciliation) approach may lack a critical aspect. Not just about the paid job and caring commitments, but the sets of activities that are useful at home and in society/economy versus monetary valorisation (*VFT) of these activities.
This approach stresses: human activities (work) and socio-economic conditions linked to wage relations.
Precarity makes these social contradictions more visible: more acute the need to have secure income. Most literature on w-l balance accept the division of paid and unpaid work.
There is then studies that ‘complicate’ the picture asserting that care work is work [feminist approach is anti-functionalist], but blurring the boundaries often overlook the fact that (parents’) living time is ‘divided’:
The critical approach, while considering care work as work, also recognises that paid employment places divisions on the basis that their activities need to be ‘valorised’ (that is: precarious parents need an income).
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusUnpublished - 3 Jul 2021
EventConference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE): Precarity, capitalism and work-Life boundaries in post-Covid. - Online
Duration: 3 Jul 20213 Jul 2021

Academic conference

Academic conferenceConference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE)
Period3/07/213/07/21

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