Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.5613/rzs.47.2.4
A Qualitative Study of Labour Market Precarisation and Involved Fatherhood in Slovenia
Majda Hrženjak
orcid.org/0000-0003-1809-5450
; Peace Institute – Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Abstract
Discussions about the reconciliation of work and family are often considered to be focussing on women and middle class people with safe employments. By identifying the differences among men in their capacities to engage in involved fatherhood that stem from their positions in the labour market, this article introduces the perspective of a deprivileged marginalised group in the labour market and critically reflects on the impact of labour flexibilisation on caring masculinity and gender equality. Men as employees have heterogeneous positions in the labour market, which impacts their access to social – including parental – rights and possibilities for balancing work and care. Given that the precarisation of the labour market is a salient problem in Slovenia, this qualitative study based on explorative in-depth semi-structured interviews with fathers in diverse forms of precarious employments analysed how insecure and flexible work arrangements shape fatherhood practices, impact the chances for involved fatherhood and structure gender relations. The fathers’ experiences showed that precarious working conditions enable fathers to be intensely involved in children’s care mainly when their employment approaches standard employment in terms of stability and predictability of working hours and guaranteed workload. When work is entirely flexible and unpredictable and the employee is faced with either taking such a job or losing it, the reconciliation of work and fatherhood is aggravated as the organisation of everyday life is fully subordinated to paid work. In conclusion, precarious working relations were indicated to foster the strengthening of the breadwinner model and retraditionalisation of gender relations.
Keywords
men; masculinities; fathering; reconciliation of work and family; labour precarisation; gender; child care
Hrčak ID:
187356
URI
Publication date:
31.8.2017.
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