Working-Time Regimes, Flexibility, and Work-Life Balance: Gender Equality and Families

Abstract

In this chapter I examine a central component of working-time regimes – the legal regulation of daily and weekly hours of paid employment – and how the Canadian federal working-time regime reinforces a gendered division of paid and unpaid labour and contributes to increased stress experienced by working mothers in particular. I begin by introducing the concept of working-time regime and describing its central elements and focusing on the legal rules that regulate daily and weekly working time. Next, I briefly describe the key elements of the hours-of-work rules of the federal working-time regime. This sketch is followed by a discussion of the distribution of paid and unpaid work, emphasizing the gendered nature of this distribution, in Canada. Having set out the conceptual, legal, and empirical aspects of the federal hours-of-work regime, I turn to public policy dimensions of the lack of fit between a working-time regime that was developed in the 1960s and contemporary working-time practices, focusing on how flexibility and work-life balance are defined, and how public policy trade-offs are identified, measured, and evaluated. Once again, the emphasis is on the gendered nature of these trade-offs, which is further explored in a summary of the findings of a major study of family-work conflict in Canada. One of the goals of this discussion is to re-examine the persistent ways in which the dichotomy of family and work is perpetuated by the assumption that paid work and life/family are independent. I conclude the chapter by offering proposals for reconciling work and family life in a manner that promotes gender equality, a caring society, and social solidarity, and in doing so seek to contribute to the feminist-informed discussion of how paid work, family, and life can be achieved.