The experiences of parents in the job market profoundly affect the social inclusion of children. The three key linkages from work to child well-being and development are income, time and stress. Children need adequate and stable family incomes to meet their immediate and developmental needs. Children thrive when their parents are actively involved in their lives and in their community. And children can suffer when parents experience high stress on the job, from precarious employment, or from the challenges of reconciling the demands of paid work with those of home and family.
Social inclusion of children means that all children should have the opportunity to develop their talents and capacities to the full and to be active and valued participants in society. Inclusion demands that specific barriers to inclusion – from disability to low income -be addressed by policy-makers. A genuinely inclusive society for children would have a broad equality of material circumstances and developmental outcomes, such that gaps and distances between children in terms of present well-being and future life-chances were minimized.
In Canada, long-term parental exclusion from the job market is uncommon, with the very important exception of many single women parents on social assistance. Children in these labour market excluded families form the hard core of the at least one in 10 children who can be seen as highly vulnerable to social exclusion– living in long-term, deep poverty. This is, in turn, often associated with absolute deprivation in terms of meeting basic needs, living in crowded and substandard housing in distressed neighborhoods with limited community amenities, exclusion from developmental recreational programs, and so on. The evidence is clear that deep low income is associated with overlapping and compounding sources of disadvantage, leading to much higher developmental and health risks, and exclusion from the opportunities available to most children.
The larger group of critical concern in Canada are the children of the precariously and marginally employed, the children of parents who are regularly in the work force but who have low wages; experience irregular, unstable and often unsocial hours of work; and frequently experience short-term unemployment. In very round numbers, perhaps one in five families with children experience unemployment each year, and there is a large overlap between vulnerability to unemployment and low wages when in work. The children of the marginally employed are the core of the one in five Canadian children who cycle in and out of low income on a regular basis, not living in long- term deep poverty, but rarely leaving income insecurity definitively behind.
The growth of precarious work is one pole of the explanation for the rising income gaps which have arisen between children in the 1990s. (Between 1993 and 1998, the ratio between the before tax incomes of the top and bottom 10% of children rose from 9.5 to 11.6, and the ratio between the top and 5th decile rose from 2.8 to 3.0).
Income is not destiny, but the link from family low income to poorer child development and health outcomes has been documented in several studies which attempt to control for other factors. These linkages run through many channels, such as unmet basic needs; reduced access to adequate housing; lack of access to supportive communities, open space, developmental recreational opportunities, cultural and educational resources, and so on.
Low income is associated with unstable, precarious work, and also with high stress routinized work (low levels of job control combined with high demands. ) Stress due to work insecurity and demands on the job are, independent of income, associated with poorer physical and mental health among parents, particularly the onset of depression. This has obvious implications for the well-being of children. However, hard research in this area has been limited by difficulties systematically linking child outcomes to the very complex dynamics of income and employment among parents.
At the other end of the growing income gap between children is the pole of higher and stable income, which is associated with working very long hours in demanding professional, managerial and ‘core’ blue collar jobs. It is, perhaps, a leap to say that the children of the more affluent are at risk of exclusion. Monetary resources can compensate for lack of time by securing good child care arrangements, tutors, summer camps, and so on. But the evidence is clear that levels of stress due to work/family conflict among working families are exploding. About four in 10 working women parents report severe time stress, and only about one in three full-time working parents are satisfied with their balance of time. And it is clear that time for children and the community is being squeezed out by the demands of work. One in three father’s work more than 41 hours per week, and one in five work more than 50 hours. Long hours among mothers are rarer, but rising fast. Commuting swallows up more and more time, particularly for young parents seeking affordable housing in outer suburbs, and working shifts are becoming more irregular.
So, what can be done? What would a policy of child inclusion through work look like?
The current thrust of social policy is to strongly promote inclusion of parents through paid work, without worrying unduly about the consequences for children. Thus EI and social assistance benefits have been cut in terms of access and dollars to reduce supposed disincentives to work, promoting greater income gaps between children and deeper poverty on the part of some children. Some provinces have severely limited access to social assistance even for single parents of very young children, despite the absence of reasonably paid jobs and high quality, affordable child care for many women trying to enter the paid work force.
That said, long-term parental exclusion from paid work is probably bad for children, and current policy provides carrots as well as sticks to promote parental work. These include federal and some provincial child tax benefits and, much less often, subsidized, high quality child care and health benefits for the working poor in some provinces. An agenda for child inclusion through work – breaking down the ‘welfare wall’ – would involve much greater investment in carrots, and much less use of the punitive sticks which seriously impact upon children.
The key weakness of current social policy is that it refuses to enter the workplace except in the most tentative of terms. Employment standards legislation setting a minimum wage floor and regulating long and unsocial hours of work is almost everywhere in retreat. Access to collective bargaining in the private sector has fallen below one in five workers. As employment has shifted to more precarious forms of work and smaller workplaces, the sphere of regulation has receded rather than expanded. Reform proposals which have been advanced for at least 20 years – equal pay and benefits for part-timers, limits on mandatory overtime, rights to temporarily reduced or changed hours and parental leaves – have gone nowhere (with the significant partial exception of extended EI parental leave.)
Inclusion of parents through paid work has profoundly different implications for children in Canada when compared to contexts like Scandinavia and the Netherlands where there are high wage floors for women as well as men, relatively much more equal earnings and family incomes, substantial transfers to families with children, high levels of employment security, lower and more stable working hours, and significant public and employer supports for working families.
To be sure, many employers in Canada do provide decent pay and benefits and flexible work arrangements which meet the needs of children. And there is strong evidence that ‘family friendly’ workplaces go hand in hand with high productivity. But the fundamental point remains that the desirable norm is being eroded from both sides – the side of precarious jobs, and the side of high pressure, long-hours jobs – with negative consequences for the inclusion of children.
As an alternative, it is worth recalling the 1994 recommendations of the Donner Report on Working Time and the Redistribution of Work to then Minister of Human Resources Development Lloyd Axworthy. The central point was that there can be a progressive redistribution of working time from the over-employed to the under-employed and precariously employed, with gains for both in terms of a higher quality of life. Such a redistribution has taken place to the greatest extent in the Netherlands, where the emerging norm is for both fathers and mothers to work a four day week. The central means to this end advocated by the Donner Report was a national dialogue, led by a political champion, to promote pervasive, decentralized, negotiated change.
It is past time that connections be made between an agenda for child inclusion, and an agenda for progressive change in the workplace as part of a broader vision of social change.
Andrew Jackson , Director of Research at the Canadian Council on Social Development (CCSD), is actively engaged in theoretical and empirical work linking social and economic issues. He authored the recent paper, “Why We Don’t Have to Choose Between Social Justice and Economic Growth: The Myth of the Equity-Efficiency Trade-off.” He is co-ordinating a number of projects using social indicators, including work for the Laidlaw Foundation on the social inclusion/exclusion of children, work for Canadian Heritage and the Department of Justice on social cohesion, work on the 2001 version of the CCSD’s Personal Security Index, and developmental work on community-level social indicators.
Andrew Jackson joined the CCSD in June 2000, after 11 years as senior economist with the Canadian Labour Congress. At the CLC, he was responsible for research on employment, fiscal, monetary, taxation and international economic issues. He has worked with government task forces on training, taxation, working-time and workplace issues, and was active in the research work of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD. Mr. Jackson is a widely respected labour economist and has been a regular media commentator on employment and social policy issues. He is a research associate of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and he is the co-author of three books, including one recently published by the CCPA entitled Falling Behind: The State of Working Canada 2000. Mr. Jackson has also published numerous papers in academic journals and books. He has been a frequent speaker at policy conferences and before Parliamentary Committees.
Mr. Jackson was educated at the London School of Economics and Political Science (BSc. (Econ) and MSc. (Econ) and at the University of British Columbia (Doctoral studies in Canadian Political Economy). His previous employment experience includes periods as a college teacher and as a program officer with the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre. Andrew Jackson has been active as a volunteer in the social policy community, previously serving on the boards of the Social Planning Council of Ottawa-Carleton and the Canadian Council on Social Development. In 1999, he served on the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Chair’s Task Force on Employment.
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