How well do wealthy countries support working parents? Comparing Sweden, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.S. through the prism of justice

ABSTRACT

This article identifies four strands of justice and uses them to evaluate the work–family support policies of five postindustrial democracies, Sweden, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.S. It provides a full-bodied set of concepts for thinking critically and comparatively about how countries go about supporting working families, and makes a case for the value of thinking about how justice claims are used to frame such policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Justice
• public policy
• political theory
• gender
• equality policies
• comparative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Financial assistance with paying for food is also available from the federal government through three nutrition program for those who fall below a poverty threshold SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka Food Stamps), the National School Lunch Program, and WIC (Women, Infants and Children).

2 As in Sweden, crèches charge a sliding scale fee, but subsidies for private care providers are not as generous to low-paid workers.

3 Seelieb-Kaiser and Toivonen get at this tension when they argue that the structural dynamic that makes it difficult to hire replacement workers when someone takes a leave,

combined with a strong cultural aversion to “causing trouble to others” (meiwaku wo kakeru) that tends to dampen individual assertions of entitlements, has … limited the propensity of many Japanese employers to support robust parental leave schemes for even professionally well-trained women. (2011, 353)

4 Steinmo recounts a memorable story in this vein of the dean of the faculty of a university publicly shaming a female professor who had asked to take parental leave (2010, 141). See Boling (1990) for a fuller discussion of the valences of public and private in Japan.

5 There are a number of activist organizations and think tanks that do make such arguments, of course, including the Children’s Defense Fund, the Partnership for Women and Families, and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

6 This distinction is developed in the varieties of capitalism literature. General skills are acquired through acquiring degrees and education and are readily transferred from one job to another. Firm-specific skills (and to a lesser degree sector-specific ones) are acquired through on the job training that costs the company a lot, and creates disincentives to hire workers who are likely to interrupt their work lives (Estevez-Abe 2007).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the Japan-US Friendship Commission, the North East Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, the Social Science Research Council, and fellowships from Fulbright (US-UK Fulbright Commission) and from the Purdue University Center for Behavioral and Social Sciences.