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, Carlota Sole Soldevila (secret.) , Birgit Pfau-Effinger (voc.) This dissertation has shown how from the seventies progressively more gender neutral family-related leaves have been in development in Europe as a key piece of the emerging care and work arrangement in society. Leave arrangements for working parents and informal carers in European policy have become a regulatory mechanism of the changing relationship between individuals in families, the labour market and the state.
Earnings-related and individualised leave arrangements represent a societal option towards constructing a right to care and the development of a universal adult breadwinner-and-caregiver citizen, underpinning the emerging post-industrial family system. They may favour a societal work-life balance, where paid and unpaid work are more equally shared amongst women and men, amongst social classes, and amongst ethnic groups. This addresses the question raised after the care crisis produced in the context of the second demographic transition on how and by whom care will be provided in the future.
Parental leave arrangements can be seen as a precursor to wider-purposed leaves or other working time policies allowing the management and redistribution of work over the life course. Such mechanisms might become a highly functional resource if men and women are supposed to balance work and life better for longer periods of life and professional careers. In the knowledge-based society, life-long learning, personal development and adaptability have become functional prerequisites. Leave arrangements and career interruption mechanisms (including time accounts, wider care-purposed leaves, sabbatical and education leaves, or leaves to perform national or international work of a social interest) have been conceptualised as semi-formal forms of work connected to temporary life phases and transitions. The whole leave system constitutes a type of transitional labour market, providing flexibility and security (flexicurity) to individuals and work organisations. The option to redistribute working time over the life course according to individual or family events contributes to the extension of working life, enhancing the interplay between the quality of life and the quality of work and providing a sustainable path of productivity, flexible enough to integrate important life events.
This dissertation has situated leave arrangements at the centre of the academic debate on gendered and family welfare regimes. The parental and care leave system is located at the intersection of work and welfare and work and family societal arrangements. Well paid parental leave has been interpreted in terms of de-commodification in relation to parental employment and market child care provision; of de-conjugalisation income-pooling and re-parentalisation insofar as it facilitates the upbringing of children. This conceptual distinction may help to anticipate the effects of different types of leave arrangements. While lessening conjugal dependencies, earnings-related individualised parental leave arrangements support family formation in post-industrial societies based on dual-earner households. This analytical tool facilitates an understanding of the relative contribution of different types of leave policies to family formation and to family change, particularly to the process of individualisation within a more diversified post-industrial family system.
