Work-life Balance, Working Conditions and the Great Recession

This chapter examines satisfaction with work-life balance in a comparative perspective, drawing on employment and welfare regime theories. The chapter pays particular attention to working conditions and finds that factors such as working hours and level of autonomy are strongly predictive of satisfaction with work-life balance. The chapter also investigates the effects of recessionary factors such as experiences of financial hardship, cut-backs in household income, job insecurity and firm level financial difficulties. A number of key indicators of job quality vary systematically by regime: job control and schedule control are higher and job insecurity lower among employees in the Nordic and Continental regimes than in the Liberal and especially Southern and Transition countries. Employees in Nordic and Continental regimes also report less negative change in the past three years in either their household circumstances, the firms they work in or the jobs they work in. Employees in other regimes, particularly the Liberal regime, but also the Transition and Southern regimes, were much more exposed to deterioration in job quality and income over the crisis period. These results on individual employees suggest that regimes do vary in the quality of work and exposure to the great recession, and how work is organised has a significant influence on employees’ perception of their ability to balance work and family life.