On the Trail of Unpaid Work

The ending of the dominance of the traditional breadwinner model means that paid and unpaid work have become more interwoven with each other. Socioeconomic policy ought to take account of this, and measures are accordingly being taken to make it easier to combine work with care tasks. However, this does not mean that unpaid work is automatically included in the overall preparation of socioeconomic policy.
In order to promote the integration of unpaid work in socioeconomic policy, SCP has developed an instrument at the request of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment: the Phased integration of unpaid work. This report describes this instrument and applies it to the 2001 social policy memorandum (Sociale nota 2001), one of the central planks of the government's socioeconomic policy. The analyses show that unpaid work is assigned a place mainly in labour relations policy; in other areas of socioeconomic policy almost no account is generally taken of unpaid work, whereas the literature suggests that there is every reason to do so. The report offers policymakers tools for integrating unpaid work in socioeconomic policy more than at present.