Workfare Reform and Family Leave Policy

This chapter discusses changes in gender equality policy content and how they reflect the wider state reform from welfare to workfare. It sheds light on the multiple political struggles and cleavages in gender equality policies in Nordic corporatist countries by focusing on a particularly conflictual and contested policy—recent efforts to reform the Finnish family leave system. Although a profound reform of the family leave system has been on the gender equality policy agenda throughout the 2000s, it only became possible after labour market organisations and right-wing political parties framed the need for reform in an economised form, highlighting its positive effects on women’s employment. The chapter shows how the reform and public discussion concerning it revolve around the intensification of women’s paid labour, seen as critical to competitive economies, and the intensification of women’s reproductive labour, seen as a substitute for state protection. The chapter suggests that such intensification of women’s labour is not a side-effect of workfare reform but at the heart of this reform. It also shows that gender equality policies and arguments about gender equality play an important role in the workfare reform by associating the intensification of women’s labour with freedom, dignity and emancipation.