What a State She's in! : Western Welfare States and Equitable Social Entitlements

Abstract

The issue of care work has become a burning issue in western capitalist welfare states because of the greater proportion of women in the workforce and the growth of alternative forms of family arrangement outside of the traditional male breadwinner model. This article addresses equity and welfare states with respect to social entitlements around care. It asks how new theoretical concepts can be applied to understand welfare states and their evolving employment-related family policies, using Nancy Fraser's utopian universal caregiver approach as a model for evaluation. It focuses on carers and evaluates how a modern citizen is expected to be financially self-sufficient and yet also perform care duties at home. The term ‘carer-commodification’ captures the extent to which the state expects carers to engage in the labour market and how non-carer earners are engaged in care duties. The term ‘carer-stratification’ incorporates the extent to which the state creates differences between carers. Policies from selective welfare states (Sweden, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States) are evaluated speculatively with these tools, and how they fare with equitable social entitlements is illustrated.