Addressing workers' needs: work-family policies and their benefits
Work-family measures are policy solutions intended to facilitate all workers' access to decent work by explicitly and systematically addressing and supporting their unpaid family responsibilities. ILO Convention No. 156 and Recommendation No. 165 provide considerable policy guidance and represent a flexible tool to support the formulation of policies that enable men and women workers with family responsibilities to exercise their right to engage, participate and advance in employment without discrimination. Work-family measures can be taken at the national, community and workplace levels and are intended to make family responsibilities more compatible with paid work and to make working conditions more compatible with unpaid family responsibilities. Policies that actively encourage men to participate in family responsibilities are needed. This will only be possible through behaviour-changing measures, such as paid paternity and parental leave, as well as education, public information and awareness-raising measures to specifically address gender stereotypes in the household, society and at the workplace. In addition, recognizing, measuring and valuing unpaid care work, through sound and systematic policy research, is fundamental to formulate and implement effective work-family policies and measures.
Government has a leadership role to play in setting policy orientation and creating a social climate that is conducive to dialogue and change for improving work-family reconciliation. In particular, government has the key responsibility of carefully design legislation in view of equality objectives, thus challenging the gendered division of paid and unpaid work. As the ILO Committee of Experts as noted, "measures designed to promote harmonization of work and family responsibilities, such as childcare services, should not be specific to women". In fact, excluding fathers' access perpetuates the idea that women alone are responsible for their children's care, and raises risks of discrimination against women in the workplace.
As Convention No. 156 establishes, in designing and implementing work-family measures, workers' and employers' organizations have indispensable roles to play (Art.11). In addition, establishing a tripartite national policy framework, encouraging collective bargaining agreements that reinforce and potentially surpass statutory requirements, fostering family-friendly measures in the workplace, improving working conditions while ensuring the competitiveness of enterprises, are proven approaches for ensuring national and workplace policies that are relevant and responsive to the needs of workers and employers.
The following diagram summarizes the diverse measures to promote work-family reconciliation established by ILO standards on workers with family responsibilities, which fall mainly within the direct means of action of governments, social partners and civil society actors. Click on each bubble to learn more about each component.
Source: Adapted from the provisions of the ILO Workers with Family Responsibilities Convention, 1981 (No. 156) and its Recommendation (No. 165)
Developing integrated work-family policies is not just an issue concerning the welfare of individual workers and their families; it affects the social and economic development of the whole society. Governments, as well as employers, trade unions and the public, at large, are increasingly realizing that many families are having difficulties balancing work and care needs of their dependents. In particular, parents' ability to work and work productively is being limited by the lack of sound work-family measures while many children, elderly, sick and disabled are being affected by the lack of quality care. It is thus increasingly accepted that it is in the public interest to elaborate and implement integrated work-family policies, since this has significant beneficial effects to society as a whole.
Comprehensive work-family policies are an essential aspect of quality working life and have to become a key component of employment and social national strategies aimed at achieving gender equality and decent work. The benefits of policies that support Work and Family Reconcilation are many.
