Combining Paid Work and Family Care

Policies and Experiences in International Perspective

Kröger, Teppo, Yeandle, Sue

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781447320470
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As populations age around the world, increasing efforts are required from both families and governments to secure care and support for older and disabled people.At the same time both women and men are expected to increase and lengthen their participation in paid work, which makes combining caring and working a burning issue for social and employment policy and economic sustainability. International discussion about the reconciliation of work and care has previously focused mostly on childcare. Combining paid work and family care widens the debate, bringing into discussion the experiences of those providing support to their partners, older relatives and disabled or seriously ill children. The book analyses the situations of these working carers in Nordic, liberal and East Asian welfare systems. Highlighting what can be learned from individual experiences, the book analyses the changing welfare and labour market policies which shape the lives of working carers in Finland, Sweden, Australia, England, Japan and Taiwan.

PART ONE

Working carers of older people

THREE

Family rediscovered? Working carers of older people in Finland and Sweden

Outi Jolanki, Marta Szebehely and Kaisa Kauppinen

Introduction

In this chapter, we draw together knowledge on employment legislation and payments to working carers with studies on family care of older people. The chapter focuses on adult children and other family members who care for older people in Finland and Sweden. As discussed in previous chapters, carers in general and working carers in particular have only recently become a policy issue in the Nordic countries. However, as we have also seen, the lack of political interest does not reflect a lack of actual care provided by family members. The characteristics and situations of working carers are somewhat uncharted territory in both countries. Four central questions are addressed in this chapter: ‘Who are the carers?’; ‘What kind of support is available for them?’; ‘Are their working lives affected by caring responsibilities?’; and ‘How do they perceive their everyday lives?’

In Finland and Sweden, the position of carers of older people cannot be understood without addressing the role of public actors, such as the state and municipalities. As discussed in Chapter Two, in both countries, municipalities are legally obliged to organise care for older people and a wide variety of social and health care services have been developed to meet the care needs of older people through formal, publicly funded systems.

Nevertheless, family members in both countries provide a great deal of support and help to older people, and their role seems to be growing (Kröger, 2005). In Sweden, family care (in particular, help by daughters) has increased among older people with compulsory – rather than with further – education only (Szebehely and Trydegård, 2012). The reduction of services for older people in Finland and Sweden (see Chapter Two) has happened without any significant legislative or policy change at the national level, but was possible because public care services for older people are not legally enforceable rights, and laws and regulations do not clearly define what type of services municipalities should provide. The state can steer and recommend, but municipalities are free to decide the type, eligibility criteria and coverage of the services they offer, including the extent of support for family carers.

While older people’s care services vary across municipalities, in most cases, the proportion of older people living in residential care facilities or receiving home care services has been declining and care services have been redirected to those with greater care needs. Since the mid-1990s, the coverage of eldercare services has been lower in Finland and Sweden than in the other Nordic countries (Nososco, 2009). It can be argued that families of older people are not openly ‘responsibilised’ (Clarke, 2005) as carers, but that the restructuring of public care services has implicitly increased the expectation that family members will provide care.

In the past, comparative policy analysis has stressed the de-familialising potential of Nordic welfare states; however, recent studies have argued that, latterly, reduced public services in Finland and Sweden have increased the pressure on family members to provide care. Saraceno (2010) notes that in countries like Sweden and Finland, publicly funded services are increasingly targeted towards those with greater care needs. She argues that the situation of family members of older people with high-level needs can be characterised as ‘supported familialism’, whereas ‘unsupported familialism’ (or ‘familialism by default’) better depicts the situation of family members of older people with low-level needs.

Despite their similar trends of declining service coverage, there are also important differences between the two countries that probably affect the role family members play in older people’s care. Service users pay higher fees in Finland than in Sweden (Kröger and Leinonen, 2012; Szebehely and Trydegård, 2012) and there is evidence that more Swedes than Finns find eldercare services affordable (Eurobarometer, 2007: 77). Thus, formal care services may be perceived as more attractive by those who use them in Sweden. In Finland, citizens of all ages see both public care services and next of kin as important sources of help (Siltaniemi et al, 2009). By contrast, Swedish attitude surveys suggest that older people in general prefer to receive public home care services rather than help from their family members (Szebehely and Trydegård, 2012). These different attitudes are reflected in a Eurobarometer survey (Eurobarometer, 2007) that asked respondents about the best option for older people who can no longer live alone because of health problems. In this international comparison, public care services were seen as an important source of support in both countries, but more so in Sweden than in Finland.

Table 3.1: Perception of the best care options for elderly parents among population aged 15 years and above, 2007 (%)

	Live with family, or children should visit and help	Use public or private home care services	Move to a nursing home	Other (it depends, don’t know, none)
Finland	32	51	13	4
Sweden	17	60	20	3
EU-27	54	27	10	9

Source: Eurobarometer (2007: 67).

How should the difference between Finland and Sweden in these figures be interpreted? Some suggest that Swedes appreciate their generous public care services and see formal care as a high-quality option (Alber and Köhler, 2004), whereas public discussion in Finland has been dominated in the past decade by news of poor-quality institutional care and inadequate public home care services. From this perspective, the figures in Table 3.1 may say more about trust – or mistrust – in the quality and accessibility of public care services than about family norms. Thus, while it seems evident that the views of Finns and Swedes differ, the explanation for this difference remains a matter for further research.

Employment and care responsibilities

Drawing on available Finnish and Swedish studies of the prevalence of caring and the characteristics of working carers, this part of the chapter outlines what is known about gender divisions and the age and working status of employees with care responsibilities. Unfortunately, most studies do not report the age of those cared for, but as very few older people live with their offspring in the Nordic countries, we focus on care provided outside the carer’s own household, which is where most intergenerational care of older people takes place in these countries. In considering this topic, it should be noted that women have participated in paid work almost as much as men in both Finland and Sweden for several decades and that a higher proportion of middle-aged women have paid jobs in the Nordic countries than in the EU as a whole. In addition, as discussed in Chapter One, in both Finland and Sweden, more middle-aged women work full-time or long part-time hours than in most countries.

Finland

The Work and Health in Finland 2009 study examined the caring responsibilities of employees aged 45–63, finding that 22% reported looking after someone who needed help due to old age, illness or disability (Kauppinen and Jolanki, 2012: 139).1 Another study reported even higher numbers of employees with care responsibilities outside their own homes: 45% of employees aged 45–54 helped an adult relative at least monthly and 21% in this group helped for 10 or more hours per month (Lehto and Sutela, 2008: 154). The differences in the figures reported probably arise from different question wording: the Work and Health in Finland study asked respondents if, outside their own work, they look after someone who needs help due to ‘old age, illness or disability’, while Lehto and Sutela (2008) asked about helping or looking after a parent or spouse’s parent or grandchild without specifically mentioning care needs arising from disability or illness.

In the Work and Health in Finland study, 62% of those who provided help were women and 38% were men (Kauppinen and Jolanki, 2012: 133). Women and men differed significantly in their socio-economic circumstances, with caring being most frequent among male manual workers and among female lower-level salaried employees. Respondents mainly gave support to a parent or parent-in-law (79%). Helping was rather intensive, as 74% of carers provided assistance at least two or three times a week (69% of women, 78% of men). Care tasks were noticeably gender-divided: women mostly helped with household chores and personal care while men mainly helped with repairs, gardening and financial matters (Kauppinen and Jolanki, 2012: 142; see also Autio, 2005).

Both carers’ and non-carers’ preparedness to take care leave to care for their relative seemed very high. About half the respondents (52% of carers, 51% of non-carers) said they would be willing to leave work for a certain period to look after someone who needed constant care, and another quarter said they would do so under certain conditions.2 The main issues affecting willingness to take care leave were financial – including the likelihood of being compensated for loss of earnings – and work-related, such as the opportunity to return to the same job (Kauppinen and Jolanki, 2012).

Workers with care responsibilities experienced work–family conflict more often than workers without such obligations (Kauppinen and Jolanki, 2012: 146). Both men and women with caring roles were significantly more likely than other workers to feel that they were neglecting home due to work and to experience their life situation outside work as difficult.3 Carers reported significantly more difficulty in concentrating at work than non-carers, but caring women reported this more than caring men (21% and 11%, respectively). Compared with workers who had no care responsibilities, carers more often doubted their ability to continue working in their profession until retirement, and had more often considered applying for early retirement. The difference between carers and non-carers is clear, even though the data do not provide information about whether the respondents felt their difficulties were related to care responsibilities. Nevertheless, the study showed that among carers, three factors in particular were related to thoughts of early retirement: (1) caring for a parent or spouse’s parent; (2) rating one’s own health as poor; and (3) having diminished interest towards work (Kauppinen and Jolanki, 2012). Having care responsibilities does not necessarily mean that they are experienced as a burden. Lehto and Sutela found that the experience of feeling burdened was linked to the number of hours spent caring. Almost a quarter (24%) of workers caring for more than 10 hours per month, and a third (32%) of those caring for 30 or more hours per month, reported problems in combining work and family life (Lehto and Sutela, 2008: 157). These findings suggest that care responsibilities alone do not create work–family conflict, but, as exemplified in the studies cited later in the chapter, result from several different factors.

Sweden

In Sweden too, there is a scarcity of population-based interview studies on working-age carers of parents and other family members. Jeppsson Grassman (2005: 43) found that 22% of those aged 16–8...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One: Working carers of older people
• Part Two: Working parent-carers of disabled children
• Part Three: Working partner-carers
• Conclusions