Family and Work. From Conflict to Conciliation, 2005

The conflict between family and work is at the base of several social problems.
The lack of work for the young means to postpone, or even worse, to renounce to the creation of a family. Working women often have to renounce to motherhood if they do not want to loose work.
Hours and rhythms of work make it always more difficult for parents to find time to stay with the children… Being good workers and good parents at the same time becomes an impossible task. Assisting a dependant person in the family can also mean to renounce to work.
In short, for a growing number of persons, work and family do not fit together.

Modern societies seem to want to take remedial action making familylife more easy for working people.
Conciliation  between family and work is an issue. But what means “conciliation” and how it is pursued?
The Report analyses the Italian situation and proposes a new way of reading the phenomenon.
We can see two sceneries which broadly define the main alternative modalities to understand and to practice the conciliation.
The first scenery is called “labouristic” because it thinks about conciliation as a collection of measures - negotiated between state and market- meant to facilitate and to spread the access to work.
Conciliation  becomes a necessary instrument for achieving the goal of realizing a society in which 70 % of the total labour force is employed.(Lisbon Treaty)). The family appears a composition of ties that obstruct  a more fluid and flexible participation of individuals at the labour market and therefore the family needs to be conciliated with working requirements.
The second scenery is called “subsidiary”  because conciliation is thought to be a composition of  concrete measures that makes more satisfactory the relation between the two life spheres, in order to harmonize their specific requirements. It is underlined that conciliation can not be only a mean for raising the level of participation at the labour market, nor can it only be a question of agreement between political an economical actors.
It has to be an goal that involves all the actors of a community which has the task to create a support- network  between family and professional employment.
Conciliation has to be understood and practised as a way to regenerate and to give value to the social capital of the family and of the surrounding community.
The report analyses the actual trends, their effects, the legal guide-lines , and the “good practices”, realizing new synergies between family and work. The goal is to create  the social/ social  conditions in which the space of family relations can be recognized as necessary and therefore safeguarded as an essential good.

Work and family: why and how we have to concile
Pierpaolo Donati

Which conciliation between family and work? The relational perspective
Pierpaolo Donati

Fertility and work: the difficult search for new instruments and for new balances
Gian Carlo Blangiardo

Work and family: between ideal and reality. Orientations and choices of Italian men and women
Giovanna Rossi

Childhood services of the “third generation” in Italy and in Europe. Reception, conciliation and policies for the quality of time: examples of “good practices” in a relational perspective
Riccardo Prandini

The legislation of the labour market in support to the family after some juridical change (the Biagi reform)
Michele Tiraboschi

The economic problems of family/work conciliation
Gabriella Berloffa

Safeguarding and enhancing  housework: civil aspects
Mauro Paladini

New cultures in enterprises for the conciliation between work and family: good practices, possible models
Francesco Belletti, Lorenza Rebuzzini

“Workfare” or subsidariety? Make more visible work in order to make more visible the family
Pierpaolo Donati