Family issues enter the EU political agenda as a part of the emerging new “European Social Model”

Mariagrazia Rossilli

In its 1984 judgement in the Hofmann case, the European Court of Justice stated that the Directive 76/207 on the equal treatment of men and women in the workplace allows member states to grant to mothers a period of maternity leave, after the statutory protective period has expired, but it does not require that they grant such leave to fathers, since the directive does not concern the organisation of the family, or the alteration of the division of responsibility between parents.[1] In effect, the Directive states that the protection of women as regards both pregnancy and maternity is a permitted exception to the principle of equal treatment in the workplace.

At end of July 2000 the Council approved a Resolution on the balanced participation of women and men in family and working life that encourages member states to grant, in addition to maternity and parental leave, an individual right to paternity leave, that is the right of male workers to reconcile family and working life without discrimination on the ground of sex.

These two examples give an idea of the extent of the changes that have occurred in the EU policies towards the family in the recent years.

Below I argue that the changes at EU level in attitudes towards the family are the result of two interconnected processes. They are both a consequence and a component of the new approach to social policy which is bringing about a new “European social model” that is replacing post-war welfare regimes and the related gender and family relationships. This approach is linked to the “new supply -side policies” which are substituting the redistribution of market outcomes with the redistribution of opportunities and the capacity of individuals for successful market participation. But they are also a result of the parallel process of the increasing Europeanization of employment and social policies - a process of coordination of national systems rather than harmonisation - which has been accomplished in the 1990s to a larger extent than had been expected a few years ago.

To elucidate these processes I will first discuss the history of EU gender policies since they have played a strategic role in the restructuring of labour market and welfare provisions and in the emerging of a new "European social model".

The history of EU gender policies

Like all EC social legislation, the binding legislation on the equality of women has been confined to provisions concerning the workplace. Beginning with equal pay (article 119 of the Treaty of Rome), EC legislation has gone on to address equal treatment and equal opportunity, including parental leave and the measures to combat sexual harassment in the workplace. Despite this extension, which has been driven by the jurisprudence of the EJC and the political action of the European Commission and the European Parliament, EC binding legislation has only achieved a certain degree of formal equality of women workers.

The three Directives of the 1970s, which constitute the core of the EC’s legislation on this matter, prohibit discrimination on grounds of sex in workers’ pay, treatment and social security.[2] The two weak Directives of the 1980s extend the prohibition to private occupational pension schemes and establish the legal occupational status of self-employed women.[3] The 1976 Directive on equal treatment also legalises positive action to redress female disadvantage in the labour market and to promote equal opportunity for men and women. However, the Directive does not oblige member states to promote positive action, does not indicate any definite model of positive action nor any specific system of incentives. The ECJ has always interpreted in a restrictive manner the derogations to the principle of non-discrimination on grounds of sex, including positive action measures. These must be of a specific rather than a general nature applying to areas where inequalities are shown to exist. Up to the Amsterdam Treaty (1997), positive action aimed at redressing the imbalance of women's opportunities in the labour market, rather than at redistributing results (jobs or careers), as occurred with American affirmative action that set quotas and discriminated in favour of women at the point of selection in order to meet such quotas (CEC 1990). The European notion of positive action has been aimed at making market competition ‘increasingly fair’ and bringing women ‘up to’ the ‘starting gate’ of the ‘race’. That is to say that it has been grounded in liberalism. It is only the Amsterdam Treaty that legalises quotas at the point of selection in favour of the underrepresented sex - not of women. This provision is likely to encourage male employment in job sectors predominantly occupied by women and to open up higher-level jobs and careers to some highly qualified women.

The implementation of Directives at the national level has been a piecemeal process. Enacting legislation, which varies considerably between states, has often reproduced or multiplied the omissions and the limits of the directives.[4] For instance, national legislation delayed the prohibition of indirect discrimination for long time or failed to define it adequately. Therefore enacting legislation following from the Directives has only had a minor impact on indirect discrimination. In fact, indirect discrimination, besides encountering resistance and opposition from national legislators and courts, is very difficult to prove in judicial systems based on individual guarantees, like the European systems, since it implies a balance between the right of the employer to pursue legitimate goals and the fundamental right of the worker to non discrimination.

As regards positive action, it has encountered little support at the national level. Governments have usually opted for a voluntary model based on the mutual consent of the social partners, leaving to the administration or to the negotiations between the social partners the responsibility of promoting and implementing it. There are only few exceptions to the voluntary model of positive action programmes and these mostly refer to the promotion of positive action in the public sector.

As a whole, these Directives have acted principally as catalysts on the legislation of Member States to advance the formal equality of women workers and to provide better individual guarantees against direct sex discrimination. Like article 119, they were mainly aimed at establishing common rules for employers, so as to avoid the use of female workers for unfair competition within the common market.

As is well known, in the 1980s the Council of Ministers and the European Commission battled over social policies. On the one hand, the governments of Member States resisted any further social regulation or broadening of EC competence in matters of social legislation. On the other hand, EU Commission's President Delors was a strong upholder of a European social model that would increase economic competitiveness and employment through a flexible and mobile workforce, while providing a basic Community standard of workers’ rights against unfair competition in the internal market. The subsidiarity principle, later incorporated in the Maastricht Treaty, allowed European institutions to overcome this stalemate. A new approach to social regulation that fitted the subsidiarity principle had emerged. It is characterised by an increasing number of non-binding soft laws, and a reduction in the number of European Directives which allow for member states’ wide discretion in their implementation. It is not by chance that the Directives of the 1990s are often formulated in such a way that no changes are necessary in extant national legislation. As a matter of fact, in the entire Delors era, the Council adopted only three weak directives on the equality of women, the two Directives already mentioned and the Directive on the protection of the safety and health of pregnant workers.[5] The latter embodies the new approach to social legislation guaranteeing minimum social protection with which only less protective national laws must align themselves. With respect to the duration of compulsory leave, it constituted an improvement only for Portuguese and British women. A de facto tendency towards harmonisation in a downwards direction of national protective standards has emerged.

In the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, the Commission has attempted to circumvent the Council’s resistance to any further social regulation and to pave the way for Delors’ social model, by developing extensive policies to promote equality between women and men. Thus, it adopted three Action Programmes on equal opportunities, and managed to make the Council issue a series of legally non-binding Recommendations and Resolutions (from the 1984 Recommendation on positive action to the I996 Recommendation on the balanced participation of women and men in the decision-making process).[6]

As a corollary to these policies, which governments were free to implement or not, the Commission mobilised the political participation and pressure of women’s organisations throughout Europe, developed transnational networks of feminist experts, and funded the European Women’s Lobby. In this way it has influenced the national agenda of women politicians in the member states. Like other social groups and political subjects dissatisfied with domestic policies, women have been ready to seize this opportunity and to develop their lobbying.

The Commission’s Action Programmes on equal opportunities have recommended that Member States develop fairly comprehensive measures (training, flexible schedules, work organization and work life cycle, part-time work, career breaks, sharing of family responsibilities, childcare, promotion of women’s small enterprises, and so forth) covering a wide range of aspects that negatively affect women in the labour market. [7] In addition, the Commission has co-financed small-scale pilot programmes of positive action that have primarily focused on vocational training, especially in non-traditional jobs and in new technology sectors. Notwithstanding the enormous differences between Member States, some of which had activated equal opportunities policies prior to Community intervention, as a whole equal opportunity programmes at the national level have been scarce, fragmentary, and limited in duration. With few exceptions, the governments have given limited support to these policies and lacked an overall strategy for implementation.[8] It was only around the mid-1990s that the cofinanced programmes on equal opportunities gained new potential, thanks to the new emphasis on the integration of women’s concerns into all global policymaking. In fact, the mainstreaming strategy finally made the Structural Funds more accessible to projects for women and helped to institutionalize the gender dimension in the regional and national implementation of Structural Funds programmes. Two NOW initiatives (New Opportunity for Women 1990 - 1999) funded approximately 2000 projects. Most of the projects focused on professional training for women unemployed or re-entering in the labour market (Lefebvre 1997). Indeed this is the only area where cofinanced programmes on equal opportunities have affected large numbers of women.

On the whole, the cofinanced programmes have served to foster the institutionalisation of equal opportunity policies at the national and regional level through Community funding, especially in Mediterranean countries where they were started thanks to European funding. The programmes provided member governments, regional and local administration, trade unions, and various institutional agencies with financial incentives and models. They helped to sensitise governments, employers, and trade unions to the benefits of flexible schedules and work organisation that reconcile paid work with family responsibilities. The European Commission’s Action Programmes on Equal Opportunities—especially the second and the third (1986–1995)—have pursued a modernising project, which supported the entry and re-entry of women into the labour market by improving their level of qualification and training. The goal was to use them as a key resource to create a flexible workforce and promote a more flexible management of professional and family responsibilities. The European Commission’s equal opportunity policies have, in fact, recommended to Member governments Delors’ project of labor market reform, which, as clearly stated in its White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, Employment, was aimed at the general reduction of labour costs (direct and indirect) and stressed the role of women (and young people) as a resource for increasing the competitiveness of the European economy (CEC 1993).

In 1994 the Essen European Council agreed on the employment policies put forward in Delors’ White Paper in order to cope with massive unemployment, and particularly with female unemployment, which was and still is higher and longer-lasting than that of men (in the EU in 1998 an average of 11.7% of women, in comparison to 8.6% of men, are unemployed). In this Summit, the Council stated that “the fight against unemployment and the equality of opportunities for men and women will continue in the future to remain the paramount tasks of the EU and its member states.” For the first time, the Council, i.e. member governments, agreed on the priority of equal opportunity measures in employment policies. Following up Essen decisions, the new title on employment included in the Treaty of Amsterdam and the special ‘job summit’ in Luxembourg (1997) marked a fundamental change in the elaboration of a the member states’ coordinated strategy and the beginning of the Europeanization of employment policies (Cameron 2000). The “Luxembourg process,” as it came to be called, set the guidelines that were to be incorporated into National Action Plans and transposed into national implementation measures and objectives. It set the following guidelines: -- promoting the employability of unemployed and inactive people through the development of a skilled and adaptable workforce; increasing vocational training for young people; modernising work organisation and forms of work, including flexible working arrangements and flexible types of contract; developing entrepreneurship; strengthening equal opportunities policies for women and men. The 1999 European Employment Pact (Koln European Council) has further strengthened this coordinated strategy and expanded EU supranational authority in this domain.

Since the Essen Summit up to the Employment Guidelines for 2000 equal opportunity policies became the fourth pillar that has to be mainstreamed into the other three, i.e. the promotion of the employability, entrepreneurship, and adaptability of workforce. Since then the measures to promote equal opportunities/equal employability of women have gained a central place in the employment policies of all member governments, and women and young people have become the targets of policies to promote flexible working arrangements, working hours, and contracts. Within the target of a 70 percent overall employment rate that has been set for 2010 (currently it is 61 per cent), a target of more than 60 per cent has been set for women’s employment, currently 51 per cent on average across the EU.

By providing member governments and various national agencies with guidelines and incentives, the Commission’s Programmes on equal opportunities fostered and anticipated current national employment policies.

The European Commission, however, has made many unsuccessful attempts to promote Community regulation of part-time and temporary work and a more flexible division of family responsibilities between parents. Its draft Directives on the right to parental leave and the protection of workers with part-time and temporary contracts have been stuck in the Council’s decision-making process since the first half of the 1980s. The EU legislative void in respect of atypical forms of work de facto fostered the deregulation of these types of jobs under the pressure of internal market competition. In the 1980s and in the first half of the 1990s, member governments have de facto used the European arena to deregulate the labor market. It was only in the second half of the 1990s that the first Framework Agreements were reached between the social partners and transformed into the Directives on parental leave and on the protection of part-time and fixed-term workers. The approval of these Directives and the emergence of an EU social dimension are primarily due to the institutional changes brought by the Maastricht Treaty, notably the Council’s majority voting and the ‘social dialogue’ which are the pillars of the Maastricht Social Agreement. They are primarily due to the emergence of what has been called ‘a European corporatist polity’ (Falkner 1998) based on cooperation of public and private players -- employers’ and workers’ associations-- which had been fought for by Jacques Delors. As a matter of fact the cooperation with the social partners is assigned a crucial role in the EU social regulation as well as in EU employment policies and in the modernisation of work organisation and flexible work arrangements (see the European Employment Pact).

The Framework Agreement on parental leave which I will examine in detail below was the first collective agreement reached at the EU level by employers’ and workers’ associations. Opening up this route, it signified the breaking of a taboo (Falkner 1998). The second Framework Agreement /Directive (1997) prohibits discrimination against part-time workers but excludes other types of atypical work from its scope.[9] Member states and national social partners, when ‘justified by objective reasons’, may exclude from the terms of the agreements specific part-time workers (according to a period of service, time worked or earning qualification) and part-timers who work on casual basis. Furthermore, the prohibition of discrimination does not include matters related to social security benefits. As a whole the agreement is substantially weaker than the various drafts proposed by the Commission. Some women trade unionists in fact complained about it (CES 1997). The women of the ETUC committee were concerned about the legal logic adopted to combat discrimination that is based on the number of hours worked. They claim that the framework agreement is not based on the principle of equal treatment between genders, as established in Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome and in the Directive on Equal Treatment. Whereas the Directive on equal treatment, from which much ECJ case law on part-time work has developed, prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex in social security schemes, the framework agreement on part-time work does not include social security matters, which is the very area in which national law permits most discrimination. Because ECJ case law was disregarded in the part-time framework agreement, some ETUC women have suggested that it is invalid. The Agreement/Directive on fixed-term work (1999), which must be implemented at the national level by 2001, extends the principle of non-discrimination to this type of work.[10] It establishes that, in respect of employment conditions, fixed-term workers shall not be treated in a less favourable manner than comparable permanent workers, unless different treatment is justified on objective grounds. Here too statutory social security schemes are excluded and the matter is recognised to be for decision by Member States. The Directive obliges Member States to introduce measures to prevent abuse arising from the use of successive fixed-term employment contracts, but leaves it up to governments to determine under what conditions these contracts shall be regarded as “successive”, that is the number of renewals, the objective reasons justifying the renewals, and the maximum total duration of successive fixed-term employment contracts.

The two Directives on the protection of part-time and fixed-term workers, obliging Member States to regulate these matters, may curb some of the more overt forms of discrimination and abuse, but they by no means constitute a definite challenge to the use of these types of contracts for avoiding standard work regulations and costs. Moreover other types of atypical work, such as homework or casual work, are excluded from the scope of these Directives and remain unregulated at the EU level. Even less do these Directives obstruct the spread of forms of employer friendly flexibility through competition in the internal market.

The figures show the results of more than a decade of increased and deregulated flexibility of labour markets. Part-time and casual work, and precarious based on temporary or fixed-term contracts account for the bulk of new jobs created in the 1990s. Although there are strong country differences, these types of jobs are so widespread that they are becoming normal rather than atypical practices. The growth in flexible, precarious and deregulated work and in women’s employability went hand in hand. Indeed, gendered models of work flexibility have spread throughout European countries, with men providing a mobile work-force available for irregular additional hours of work and women providing part-time work (Bettio et al.2000). In 1999 more than half of fixed-term workers in the European Union were women. In 1998, 17.4 percent of workers were part-timers of whom 83 percent were women. Even though there are also highly qualified and well paid women working part time, the large majority of women part-timers represent a source of cheap labour and are losing out relative to full-time workers (Gregory, Sales, and Hegewisch 1999). There is evidence that women do not prefer short part-time work, as there is evidence that overtime for part-timers tends to be widespread (Maruani 1997; Bettio et al. 2000). This suggests that hours of work are not determined by either individual choice or family commitments but by employers' needs. Furthermore there is no correlation found between high employment for mothers and high participation of mothers in part-time work (Smith et al. 1998). Even though more men than women are self-employed, the number of self-employed women increased enormously in the 1990s. Unemployed women represent the main source of this increase (Semenza 2000). Moreover, to draw a clear dividing line between independent and dependent employment became increasingly difficult, because of the growing number of new and mixed contractual forms of employment which are often highly precarious. These heterogeneous types of non-standard work are either completely deregulated or inadequately regulated by national laws, which permit various kinds of discrimination, such as lower pay, fewer statutory rights, lower or no social security contributions (Meulders and Plasman 1997; Bettio et al. 2000). Inevitably the women with the least bargaining power and the lowest skills and status are the most harmed by this situation. Part-time, temporary and casual work, which are the modern versions of traditional female underemployment, reinforce the economic dependence of these women workers. For them even formal equality is undermined. The multiplying of flexible and deregulated contractual forms runs counter to the implementation of equality laws and of pay equity in particular. Even though the principles of pay equity and equal treatment of women workers have been strengthened through their inclusion in the Amsterdam Treaty, their implementation is de facto undermined.

On the whole, European equal opportunity policies have contributed to creating new - but unequal - employment opportunities for women, especially in Southern countries, which had low female labour-force participation. On the one hand, the growth in flexible female employment contributed to creating new sex/gender inequalities in terms of occupational segregation, wage differentials, and social benefits. On the other, the Directives of the 1970s and the 1980s, the new article 141 of the Amsterdam Treaty, as well as the Directives on part-time and fixed-term work, still provide women workers with some legal means of resistance against the deregulation of the labour markets, even though these means are fundamentally weakened (or weak). Finally European equal opportunity policies have contributed to opening up new career opportunities and access to higher-paid and higher-grade work for highly qualified women.

EU measures for “reconciliation of work and family life”

Since the mid-1980s the Commission had insisted on the promotion of measures to “reconcile work and family life”. Its proposals in the Action Programmes on equal opportunities contributed to mobilising women’s pressures at EU and national levels and setting models for member governments’ future initiatives on this issue. However, up to the first half of the 1990s, the Commission was only able to make the Council issue the 1992 non-binding Recommendation on childcare.[11] The Recommendation called on the governments to set up childcare services and parental and maternity leave for the employed, those seeking a job, and those in training in order to obtain employment. Following these lines, the Council’s initiatives regarding family issues increased in the second half of the 1990s along with the Europeanization of employment policy. However, to date the Agreement/Directive on parental leave remains the only binding act in this area. The framework agreement on parental leave was signed in December 1995 by employer representatives (UNICE-Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe and CEEP-European Centre for Enterprise with Public Participation) and by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC).  It became European law with the Directive of the Council of Ministers in the following year, after more than ten years of discussion and vetoes by Great Britain. [12] The Agreement/Directive grants a right to parental leave that ‘in principle’ should be ensured to individual parents on a non-transferable basis. It sets three months as a minimum. The Directive sets out only a few minimum requirements and leaves to member states and national social partners the establishment of the conditions for access and the modes of application of this right. Member states can decide:- whether parental leave is granted on a full time or part-time basis, in a fragmented way or in the form of a time-credit system;- make the entitlement to parental leave subject to a period of work qualification and/or length of service qualification which shall not exceed one year; -adjust the conditions for access and the modes of the application of parental leave to special circumstances;- establish notice period to be given by the worker to the employer;- define the circumstances in which the employer is allowed to postpone the granting of parental leave for justifiable reasons related to the operation of the undertaking;- authorise special arrangements to meet  the operational and organisational requirements of small undertakings;-  take necessary measures to protect workers against dismissal on the ground of a claim for parental leave;- define the status of the employment relationship during the period of leave. When it comes to the Directive’s provisions on time off from work on grounds of ‘force majeure’ for urgent family reasons in cases of sickness or accident of family members, it is left to member states and/or social partners at the national and local levels to grant entitlement to workers in accordance with national legislation, collective agreements and/or practice. The same is true for the issue of non-transferability. Since the right to parental leave is non-transferable only ‘in principle’, the Directive leaves it up to governments to decide whether and to what degree parental leave will be transferable from one parent to the other. Even more negative is the lack of a specific reference to any sort of minimum income during parental leave. That no reference to a minimum allowance or income was agreed is a victory for UNICE and CEEP, but a major source of regret for the ETUC (Lapeyre 1996 124). The same is true for the issue of time off in order to care for elderly people which is not mentioned in the Agreement but was an important issue for the unions. The employers also seem very satisfied with the framework’s flexibility and with the possibility that allows them to postpone parental leave if necessary.

The granting of the entitlement to parental leave is an innovation only in Ireland and Luxembourg, where no such statutory right existed, and in Belgium where the employer’s consent was needed. The flexibility of parental leave would represent an innovation for various countries which had allowed the leave to be taken when the child is very young (e.g. Norway, Spain, Austria, France, Germany) or immediately after maternity leave (Finland, Greece, Italy, Portugal) (Europe 1995). However, this flexibility is only potentially allowed in the Directive since it is to be defined at the national level.

Concerning leave for ‘force majeure’ reasons, the Directive improves the status quo only in UK and in Ireland where such statutory right did not exist. De facto, however, even in Ireland enterprises already used to grant time off for such reasons. Furthermore the minimum amount of time which the Directive sets for parental leave represents the lowest  amount granted in any of the countries with a statutory right to parental leave, i.e. in Greece. Finally the Directive does not challenge the laws already in existence in most Member States since it lacks any reference to payments to those who take the leave. In fact, the popularity of parental leave, particularly for fathers, depends on whether it is paid or not. It is in fact in Sweden that a significant amount of men take up their right to parental leave, since pay during this leave is an earnings-related benefit and at least one month of leave must be taken by either parent.

The standard set in the Directive is lower than suggested by the Commission in its 1983 draft which granted an individual right to parental leave and also paid family leave. There has been speculation that UNICE had in fact calculated that this agreement was more flexible than pending EU regulation and that the ETUC accepted something particularly weak on wage compensation during leave (Ebbinghaus and Visser 1997). Here too, as in the case of the Agreements/Directives on the protection of part-time and fixed term workers, the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ dictates that only a few minimum conditions are set out at the EU level, whereas the member states decide on the specific details of implementation.

The importance of the Parental Leave Agreement/Directive is therefore in its existence rather than in its contents. The Directive had in fact an enormous symbolic value since it proved that the post-Maastricht social policy procedures are workable (Rossilli 1997; Falkner 1998). Its symbolic importance as the first collective agreement at the EU level that opened up the collective agreement route for EC social policy compensated for the fact that the agreed minimum standards were low.

The acceleration and monitoring of the implementation of the Directive as well as a range of other family measures aimed at promoting the balance between work and family life for men and women have been part and parcel of the equal opportunity pillar in the European Employment Guidelines of the last three years. In addition to the promotion of a “family -friendly working world” through flexible working arrangements and schedules and different types of leave, the guidelines of 1998, 1999, and 2000 recommend that the Member States must strive to raise levels of access to care services, and promote affordable, accessible and high quality care services for children and other dependants. However, the Commission’s Report on the 1999 National Action Plans on employment policies, while recognising that some efforts have been made or planned by those countries with large gaps in childcare provision, stresses that “few members stated mentioned care facilities for the elderly and concrete initiatives on care for all other dependants are lacking in all of the National Plans” (CEC. 2000b). As regards the implementation of the Directive on parental leave, the Commission reported that it has been incorrect in many cases so that proceedings against nine Member States have been initiated (for example, against Ireland for the limitation of the right to parental leave to workers who had a child after 1996)(CEC 1999).

Against this background there is little hope that the non-binding Resolution on the balanced participation of women and men in family and working life approved by the Council at end of July 2000 will have an effective impact.[13] The Council is taking up this issue for the first time and is doing this not only from the point of view of removing the obstacles to women‘s equality in the labour market, but also removing the disadvantage faced by men with regard to participating in family life and of the right of male workers to reconcile family and working life without discrimination on the ground of sex. The Resolution affirms that, bearing in mind that the beginning of the twenty-first century is a symbolic moment to give shape to a new social contract on gender in which de facto equality of men and women in the public and private domains will be accepted, the balanced participation of men and women in family and working life constitutes a precondition for this equality. Member states are encouraged to grant working men an individual and untransferable right to paternity leave to be taken at the same time as the mother takes maternity leave while maintaining their rights relating to employment. They are also encouraged to compile and publish regularly a report containing data on the participation of women and men in the labour market, as well as on the use by women and men of maternity, paternity and parental leave. The Resolution also calls on employers, workers, and the social partners at national and European level “to step up their efforts to ensure balanced participation of men and women in family and working life, notably through the organisation of working time”

The Resolution seems aimed at remedying the shortcoming of the Directive on parental leave regarding the transferability of the right to leave from one parent to the other by promoting the granting of an unequivocal individual right to paternity leave. However, here too the lack of any reference to any minimum income during the leave (paternal, maternal, or parental) represents a serious limitation to the effective enjoyment of this right, especially for male workers and for the families of lower income groups. The resolution serves mainly to sensitize national and subnational actors, and in particular social partners, to a new political approach aimed at undermining male workers' cultural resistance to taking up parental leave and overcoming their resistance to breaking the male pattern of full time work and taking up “female” types of flexible arrangements of working time. To achieve this goal it also encourages school programmes and awareness campaigns designed to develop a culture of gender equality regarding the reconciliation of working and family life. Therefore the resolution has a mainly symbolic and cultural importance. From this point of view and in relation to the legal approach, it represents a pathbreaking innovation at the EU level, since, taking into consideration the male workers’ right to a family life, it incorporates feminist views on the interdependence of the public and private spheres in men’s and women’s lives and incorporates a new notion of gender equality that is not patterned on the traditional male standard. This new legal approach aimed at making men more equal to women suggests to member governments and social partners a political model to be pursued in the future to promote a new male culture regarding family responsibilities, to encourage new male patterns of work flexibility, including part-time work, and to facilitate women’s integration in the labour market.

This Resolution with its important symbolic and cultural meaning and, most notably, the Directive on parental leave and the recommendations of the Employment Guidelines have opened the path toward the establishment of a minimum EU pattern of intervention in family policies.

While from a pre-Maastricht viewpoint, binding legislation on family concerns was not likely to appear on the EU’s agenda (Ostner and Lewis 1995, 180), the innovative provisions of the Social Agreement, which was annexed to the Treaty of Maastricht and later integrated in the Amsterdam Treaty, made it possible to unblock the issue of parental leave. The new role assigned to the social partners’ agreements that can be transformed into binding laws has been a lever to break Council stalemates, while, at the same time, the strong possibility of Council compromise on the basis of majority voting has worked as a lever to promote collective agreements at the Euro-level (Falkner 1998). In addition, the Commission pressed the reluctant employers’ association UNICE, to agree on a minimum standard of parental leave in order to demonstrate that the social dialogue was a viable way to promote a European social dimension. Finally, the new title on employment in the Amsterdam Treaty, as well as the new provision of the Treaty which includes the promotion of equality between men and women among the Community tasks, created new possibilities for Community action. It seems likely that the Council decided to use these new possibilities in its efforts to increase women’s employment. The political leaders of member states must have been convinced that the development of care services and a more flexible division of family responsibilities were necessary to reach the agreed target of increasing women’s employment in the EU of more than 9 percentage points in a little more than a decade, without disrupting family life.

The place of equal opportunities and family policies in the emerging “European Social Model”

The interconnected processes of economic globalization and increased international competition have disrupted the virtuous circle that enabled Keynesian policies to flourish. The effectiveness of the European legal instruments of ‘negative integration’ which prevents governments from interfering with the free movements of goods, services, capital, and persons and the restraints imposed by the “Stability and Growth Pact” on national governments’ public budget and capacity of redistributive social policies have accelerated the deterioration of national welfare systems (Scharpf 1996, 1999; Mortillaro 1998). All Member States have struggled hard to match the Maastricht convergence criteria and to implement austerity measures. In addition, politicians of various colours have readily used Maastricht criteria to justify the restructuring of national welfare states. Eligibility rules for early retirement, unemployment benefits, or social assistance have been tightened, higher education spending restricted, allowances for non-working adults and widows’ pensions cut down. Social policies, whether in Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, or Germany, were criticised for paying off “passive” non-working adults, females and males, for example, by allowing for extended opportunities to continue education, or by applying overly generous eligibility rules for early retirement or inability to work schemes. To put it briefly, the structural asymmetry between the EC restraints on the economic and social policies of the Member States and the absence of any prospect for building centralised redistributive policies at EU level has in fact fostered the transformation of the European model of social citizenship toward a wage-centred pattern of welfare provisions at a relatively low level and lower social security costs. This transformation has weakened women’s social rights even more seriously than men’s, given their different position in the labour market. At the same time, the capacity of member states to alleviate the high levels of unemployment has been limited by their commitment to qualify for Economic and Monetary Union which dictated a contractionary fiscal and monetary policy .

Therefore the direction of policy has shifted markedly since the mid-1990s. Throughout the EU, social policies have been increasingly designed as active labour market policies for the non-employed. The arguments put forward have underlined the right and obligation to self-reliance through paid work and individual contributions to social security funds, as well as equal opportunities based on respective capability of men and women to provide for themselves through paid work. The focus has shifted from passive to active measures and to concern for the reintegration in the labour market of unemployed and non active women and young people. Social policies are increasingly abandoning redistribution and substituting compensation for unemployed in favour of policies granting job seekers ‘initial endowments’ to improve their starting conditions in the labour market.

Indeed a new “European Social model” is emerging. Streeck (1999) describes it as “supply-side egalitarianism”, that is as a model based on policies of equal marketability aimed at equalising, through public investment, the ability of individuals to compete in the market, removing existing barriers toward men’s and women’s employability, and combating those forms of discrimination that hinder employability. Social justice is pursued not through the redistribution of market outcomes but through the redistribution of the capacities for successful market participation. Employability, which is the key word of the European Employment Pact, defines the responsibility of public policy in terms of creation of equal opportunities for commodification. However, as we have seen, equal opportunities for commodification means in fact unequal commodification of women.

The growth of women’s flexible employment has contributed to the undermining of  labour market regulations, male-dominated wage bargaining strongholds and male career patterns based on the assumption of full time permanent employment. The male breadwinner family wage, that was a pillar of post-war European welfare states, has been undermined. Indeed, at the bottom end of the pay structure of full time employed, the gender gap has narrowed as a result of levelling down the conditions and wages of male workers. However, the male breadwinner wage has not been replaced by a degendered form of family wage ensuring that all individual workers can support their families, even though they are single parents. Instead it has been replaced by a dual breadwinner family, or even by a pooling of the wages and resources provided by the continued participation in the labour market of all adult family members. This family model may better respond to labour market insecurity and the income and poverty risks that are connected with the increased flexible and precarious employment and diminished social security provisions.

Parallel to these changes there has been an evolution in the direction of handling some of the responsibilities for the care of dependants back to families as a consequence of limiting public social expenditure. Given the growing aged population and the increased family instability, this tends to weigh even more heavily than in the past on women’s unpaid care and to obstruct women’s employability.

Thus the new European initiatives on the promotion of family-friendly policies are aimed at facilitating the transformation of the family model, bringing about a more flexible division of family responsibilities, and encouraging the development of household and care services for children and other dependants. As we have seen, the Employment Guidelines increasingly recommend that member governments promote - by lowering taxes -affordable and accessible market home services - whether private or based on private-public partnership. The poor development of the market for child -care, care for elderly, and other social services, is examined as one of the main reasons for the low activity rate in EU countries in comparison with the US where the rate of activity of the working age population is roughly 15 percentage points higher than in Europe. This difference is considered as mainly due to women’s activity and employment in this sector (Scharpf 1999). In turn, the traditional model of the male breadwinner family, based on the unpaid caring and homemaking of women, appears as the main factor that has prevented the expansion of market service sectors. Therefore the new European emphasis on the development of private affordable household and personal services responds to the hope that home services will create new jobs and curb unemployment, particularly female unemployment. Since this sector has low productivity, is labour intensive, and requires “female” skills, it is a very promising sector for creating low wage, low standard, and highly feminised jobs, as has been the case in the US.

In conclusion, family policies appeared in the EU agenda as a consequence of the "new supply-side policies". In the EU policies the family is no more a mere non-market appendage of the working world, but has become a component of employment policies. Under the headings of employability and flexibility, women friendly and family friendly policies appear in fact to be serving the needs of the labour market and increasing marketisation.

On the whole, EU legislation on the equality of women and equal opportunities policies as well as family policies, have not only been part and parcel of the making of the common market, but have also played a central role in restructuring labour markets, reforming employment patterns, increasing marketisation, and bringing about a new European social model which will substitute for traditional welfare states (Ostner 2000; Rossilli 2000). They have played and continue to play a strategic role in the neo-liberalist and monetarist socio-economic policies which have prevailed in the construction of the EU even after social-democratic governments became the majority of the participating governments.

Therefore, in my opinion, equal opportunities and family policies can not be predominantly attributed to feminist action and women's lobbying. This does not mean that political actors do not matter nor that policy changes in the European Union automatically result from political and functional spill-overs of European integration as argued by neofunctionalists (Leibfried and Pierson 2000). This means however that other actors, the European Council, the Commission, the ECJ, the social partners, have been the primary and most powerful driving forces. It means that the women's lobbies have been in a weaker position, able to exert little influence on the most crucial economic and social questions, and that, in many cases, they have been too dependent on the Commission‘s political initiatives and unable to play a critical role (Woodward 1997). This is not to say that feminist action and women's lobbying were unimportant. It is to say rather that they were not the main protagonists of the EU equal opportunities and family policies, while they have played a crucial role in other aspects of gender policies, most notably in opening up a symbolic space for women in EU institutions.