Shared Work - Valued Care: New Norms for Organizing Market Work and Unpaid Care Work

For a century or more in the United States until the mid-1970s, the husband-as breadwinner and wife-as-homemaker system governed social attitudes toward paid work and unpaid care. But with the rapid increase in the paid employment of mothers, that model has been supplanted in favor of a system in which all workers - male or female - can hold a full-time job provided they conform to employers' notions of a worker unencumbered by domestic responsibilities. This model of organizing paid and unpaid work has left most American working families anxious about their ability to care adequately for their children and aging relatives, stressed by the demands of work, and starved for time. Shared Work - Valued Care examines practices in Japan, Australia, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy to gain insights into how work and care responsibilities might realistically be reorganized to better meet the needs of working families.