Abstract
The editors and contributors of Formal and Informal Work seek to explain cross-national differences in the size and structure of informal work in Europe. To do so they offer a framework—the combination of welfare arrangements and work-family arrangements—and apply it to analyze a subset of informal work activities in Denmark, Finland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Poland. The book comprises two introductory chapters laying out the theoretical framework and research design, country chapters, and a conclusion.
The editors and contributors are primarily interested in amending the “welfare regime” framework (by G. Esping-Andersen and subsequent writers) to better capture work arrangements in European countries and include key gender-based dimensions of social and family economic life. Without these dimensions, they argue, significant cross-national differences in patterns of informal and formal work cannot be understood.
The definition of “informal work” used in this volume includes paid and unpaid work within and outside the market economy. Three categories are selected:
Childcare and eldercare in the private household entailing unpaid family work, family providers paid with a state subsidy; and undeclared employment.
Volunteer work through non-profit, or social channels.
Undeclared employment—remunerated but hidden from the state—including moonlighting.
The inclusion of volunteer work reflects the editors’ interest in the boundary between paid and unpaid work, particularly for care work, because it tends to shift over time within countries and to differ cross-nationally. This boundary is also important because of the expectations that strong welfare states will tend to turn many care activities into formal work and reduce volunteer work and unpaid work within the household. The inclusion of undeclared work, also labeled “informal employment” in the book, reflects the recent European focus on employment that is hidden from tax authorities.
It is important to note what the editors have not included. Labor statisticians use a broader definition of informal market-based employment. According to the International Conference of Labor Statisticians (ICLS) 2003 definition, informal jobs include all those not covered by labor standards and social protection—whether they are undeclared or declared. Informal or casual employment can include nonstandard employment (temporary, short-term employment) or economically dependent self-employment. These categories are not examined in this volume. (The ICLS does not count volunteer work and unpaid family work because they are not tallied in national income accounts.)
By focusing on work rather than employment, the contributors are able to consider unpaid forms of work. Focusing on child care and elder care on one hand, and considering undeclared work and volunteer work, on the other hand, suits the editors’ purposes which are to understand cross-national differences in informal work and how both informal and formal work are shaped by the complex interactions of the welfare arrangements and work-family arrangements.
The editors have extended the prevalent “welfare regimes” framework. First, they have added citizens’ relationship to the welfare state (strength of civil society) to the prevailing definition of welfare states. They find this enables them to account for cross-national differences in pattern and extent of volunteer work, as well as in the paid-unpaid work boundary. Second, they use the work-family arrangement to cover societal arrangements that govern welfare-state institutions and policies focused on family, care, and employment; their effects on gender-based stratification; and the cultural values that undergird the dominant family models (e.g., male breadwinner, or dual-breadwinner models, see pp. 30–31). This is a key focus and contribution of the volume. Throughout the chapters, contributors have analyzed how dominant family models, welfare state policies, and the labor market interact to yield a particular, nationally specific and time variant, mix of formal and informal work for women and men.
By considering welfare arrangements, the contributors challenge what they deem a prevailing view in research and policy circles that institutional constraints (labor regulation, taxation) are mainly responsible for informal work, most notably for undeclared work. By considering the interactions of work-family arrangements and welfare arrangements contributors seek to account for how countries with similar welfare arrangements have divergent patterns of informal work.
Country chapters illustrate the range of combinations of informal work that arise among countries arrayed along the welfare arrangement continuum as well as the work-family arrangement range of variation. Denmark and Finland represent strong welfare arrangements with rather strong work-family arrangements while the United Kingdom represents weak welfare arrangements and Spain represents particularly weak work-family arrangements. Germany displays different work-family regimes (East and West). Poland illustrates a model under strain from unemployment, aging, and reduced state resources.
Using their framework, the editors and contributors illustrate how straightforward predictions from a welfare regime framework are tempered with the consideration of additional dimensions of welfare arrangements. For example, a state with low de-commodification of labor and low trust in government will likely experience a higher level of undeclared work because both employers and employees have a stake in doing so. Also, the work-family arrangement, including the degree to which specific family models are supported by the welfare state, will affect how formal work is combined with care work by households, and in turn determine the volume and type of formal child care.
This volume should also be considered against the backdrop of the extensive literature developed to account for informal work in developing countries where it constitutes the overwhelming share of jobs and livelihoods in urban areas. Clearly, informal work is much smaller in Europe. The preponderance of market-based work, primarily formal employment, prompts particular interest in the boundary between paid and unpaid work in the home, and voluntary versus market work outside the home. Whereas, in developing countries, all kinds of goods and services are provided through informal work, in developed countries, informal work concentrates in a subset of activities.
Finally, had the editors considered casual/nonstandard temporary employment as part of the empirical investigations in the country chapters—in other words, had they used a broader definition of informal market-based employment, they might have given a bit more weight to employer strategies and, conversely, less weight to welfare state policies, and those related to the work-family interface in explaining the relative mix of formal and informal work and the patterns of use of informal work across diverse European societies.
This volume is relevant for courses in sociology of work, gender studies, applied economics, employment relations and cross-national comparative analysis.