Work-family justice: its meanings and its implementation

ABSTRACT

It's an incredibly important moment to focus on work-family scholarship – and to consider research related to ‘just’ work and care in unsettling and challenging times. Against this backdrop, the 2022 WFRN theme was established. The conference gathered members from around the world toward building impactful scholarship for practices and policy. In this Voices piece, we draw upon WFRN presidential panelists' voices. The first plenary, ‘The Meanings of Work-Family Justice’, provided opportunities for panelists to consider different ways to conceptualize and expand this idea as labor markets, workplaces, and many aspects of people's lives are in flux, with new understandings about how to think expansively about creating ‘work-family justice’, The second plenary – ‘Work-Family Justice on the Ground’ – featured panelists from leading non-profits who discuss how they've met challenges and succeeded in implementing and building policies that create a more just world of work and care. They discuss barriers and some ideas for overcoming difficulties. We conclude by considering the evolving meanings and practices of work-family justice. In all, the voices presented here help us focus on creating more ‘just’ worlds of work and care – a distinct and vital – if sometimes precarious – possibility in this moment.

KEYWORDS:

• Work
• family
• justice
• care
• policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ideas and excerpts are drawn from related writing (Collins, 2019, 2020).

2 In this section, I present reflections and remarks presented in the WFRN Presidential Plenary: Work-Family Justice on the Ground around major themes proposed by the organizers of the plenary.

3 Bringing negative consequences for its beneficiaries

4 https://www.abetterbalance.org/resources/report-summary-women-in-the-workforce-nyc/

5 https://www.nber.org/papers/w30140

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caitlyn Collins

Caitlyn Collins is Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She conducts cross-national qualitative research on gender inequality at work and in family life. Her first book is Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (2019, Princeton University Press).

Ameeta Jaga

Ameeta Jaga (Ph.D.) is Professor of Organisational Psychology in the School of Management Studies at the University of Cape Town and a non-resident fellow with the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, Harvard University. She takes a Southern and decolonial approach to address the geopolitics in knowledge production and focuses on a gendered and social class analysis of work-family concerns primarily among low-income mothers. Her work has had policy impact in advancing workplace support for breastfeeding in local government. Ameeta has published widely across disciplines including Gender, Work and Organisation, Work, Employment and Society, International Journal of Human Resource Management, and Journal of Applied Psychology. She is associate editor of the journal Community, Work, and Family.

Nancy Folbre

Nancy Folbre is Professor Emerita of Economics and Director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Senior Fellow of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College in the United States. Her research explores the interface between political economy and feminist theory, with a particular emphasis on the value of unpaid care work. In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the author of The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems (Verso, 2021), the editor of For Love and Money: Care Work in the U.S. (Russell Sage, 2012), and the author of Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (Oxford, 2009), Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family (Harvard, 2008), and The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New Press, 2001). She has also written widely for a popular audience, including contributions to the New York Times Economix blog, The Nation, and the American Prospect. You can learn more about her at her website and blog, Care Talk: http://blogs.umass.edu/folbre/.

M. Rosario Castro Bernardini

M. Rosario Castro Bernardini, Ph.D., is a Researcher in “Livelihoods and Rights” at Oxfam America in Boston, MA. She received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology and Women, Gender and Sexuality at Pennsylvania State University.

Sherry Leiwant

Sherry Leiwant co-founded and is co-president of A Better Balance, a legal advocacy organization based in New York City with offices in Nashville, TN, Denver, CO and Washington D.C. whose mission is to ensure workers can care for their families without risking their economic security. Sherry works on campaigns to enact laws guaranteeing paid sick time, paid family leave and fair scheduling, drafting almost all of the 46 state and local paid sick time laws enacted in the U.S., paid family leave laws in 13 states and scheduling laws helping fast food workers and retail workers in New York City. ABB also has a clinic hotline that helps many callers who are having problems accessing their rights. Sherry previously ran the women’s poverty project at NOW LDEF and prior to that was a senior staff attorney at the Welfare Law Center. She is a graduate summa cum laude, phi beta kappa of Princeton University and has a J.D. from Columbia Law School. She has served on the boards of Bank Street College and Basic Trust Infant and Toddler Center.

Vicki Shabo

Vicki Shabo, Senior Fellow for Paid Leave Policy and Strategy, Better Life Lab at New America, is a gender equity expert, policy strategist, and coalition builder, who has helped to win federal, state and local paid leave, paid sick time, equal pay, and pregnancy fairness policies affecting tens of millions of people. For well over a decade, she has been a leader in the campaign to win a national paid family and medical leave program, and an advocate for policies that help people manage work and care. Shabo works closely with federal and state policymakers, advocates, researchers, and private sector leaders, as well as entertainment creators. Shabo has testified in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives, state legislatures, and before the Democratic Party’s platform committee. Her opinion pieces have been published in outlets including The Boston Globe, CNN.com, The Hill, New York Daily News, New York Times, Refinery 29, Roll Call, and USA Today and her observations have been featured widely in national, regional and state news stories. Shabo holds degrees from Pomona College (B.A., summa cum laude), the University of Michigan (M.A. in political science) and the University of North Carolina School of Law (J.D., high honors), where she served as editor-in-chief of the North Carolina Law Review.

Melissa A. Milkie

Melissa A. Milkie is Professor of Sociology & Chair of the Graduate Department at the University of Toronto; Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland; and recently served as President of the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN). An author of the award-winning Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, her research centers on gender, work-family strains and well-being, with a unique focus on time and culture. A current project, Parents Under Pressure: How Mothers and Fathers Spend and Feel About Time examines time allocations to work and family across era and region with a focus on parental experience and well-being in the United States. Dr. Milkie’s recent research appears in Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Socius, and the British Journal of Sociology.

Janet Gornick

Janet Gornick is professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is also Director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, an interdisciplinary research center at CUNY. Most of her research is comparative and concerns social policies and their impact on gender disparities in the labor market and/or on income inequality. She is the co-author or co-editor of four books: Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (2003), Gender Equality: Transforming Family Divisions of Labor (2009), Income Inequality: Economic Disparities and the Middle Class in Affluent Countries (2013), and Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth (2022). She has authored articles on gender inequality, employment, and social policy in many journals, including American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Journal of European Social Policy, European Sociological Review, Social Science Quarterly, Monthly Labor Review, Feminist Economics, and Journal of Economic Inequality. She also regularly presents her work in popular venues, including The American Prospect and Dissent. She frequently advises policymakers who are working to strengthen social policies that support and protect U.S. workers and their families.