Persisting Gender Inequalities in Employment and Working Time: A Unitary Perspective on Gender and Class Inequalities in the Labour Market

Abstract

This paper investigates how social partners have negotiated standard and non-standard worktime arrangements since the 1950s in Belgium and how these arrangements have created gendered worktime ‘regimes’ sustaining gender inequality. The institutional labour market perspective mainly understands women’s overrepresentation in non-standard worktime arrangements (Rubery et al. 1998), such as part-time work (O'Reilly & Fagan 1998) and work-life arrangements, in a given labour market as resulting from context-specific economic, social and political institutions, such as the organisation of production, labour market regulation, family models, gender relations and welfare state provisions (Rubery & Fagan 1994, Rubery & Grimshaw 2003). Although this approach reconnects more economic production and social reproduction than the neoclassical economic labour market perspective, it conceptualises them as governed by distinct rationales. Locating the cause of unequal, gendered worktime ‘regimes’ to a large extent in the ‘gender contract’ between men and women in social reproduction, whereby women disproportionately take on unpaid reproductive work (O'Reilly and Spee 1998: 264, Humphries & Rubery 1984), this perspective tends to obscure the role of capitalism in shaping them. Namely, it does not take into account how social reproduction not only reproduces life but also, by doing so, simultaneously fulfils the need of capital to obtain (flexible and cheap) labour for economic production and the implications for the position of women (Picchio 1992, Vogel 2013). To recover the role of capitalism in shaping gendered worktime regimes, this study relies on social reproduction theory (SRT), a Marxist-feminist theory that posits that under capitalism, economic production stands at once in a relation of dependence and of conflict with social reproduction. On the one hand, economic production depends on socially reproduced labour to create surplus value. On the other hand, economic production stands in conflict with the social reproduction of labour, in as far as it requires the availability of women’s labour power that cannot be invested in social reproduction, replenishing labour for future production (Bhattacharya 2017, Fraser 2014, 2016, Picchio 1992, Vogel 2013). SRT’s emphasis on the contradictory relation between capitalist production and social reproduction is essential, we hold, to gain an accurate understanding of how gender inequalities in worktime arrangements persist in contemporary capitalist societies despite women’s increased participation in paid work. To show the explanatory potential of an SRT approach, this paper conducts a longitudinal analysis of the evolution of worktime arrangements in the Belgian social dialogue between employers, trade unions and the state over the last seven decades (1953-2023). Belgium is a coordinated market economy, where the state and social dialogue institutions play an important role in regulating the economy and the labour market, including mediating the contradiction between economic production and social reproduction. The very existence of these social dialogue institutions makes the need to resolve this contradiction visible. Empirically, we primarily draw from the opinions and collective agreements of the National Labour Council, to analyse to what extent the motivations and considerations of the social partners with regard to particular worktime reforms are informed by economic production or social reproduction needs and how they in turn have affected gender equality over time. The results of this paper allow to reconstruct the turning points and key factors along the evolution of standard and non-standard worktime regulation and its gendered impact in the Belgian labour market. They show how the negotiated regulation of gendered worktime arrangements has reconciled the conflicting demands between economic production and social reproduction, but has also created increased tensions in the sphere of social reproduction and persisting gender inequalities in worktime.