1. Five Years after the European Work-Life Balance Directive: Bare minimum or real work-family support?

In 2019, the European Union (EU) implemented the long-awaited Work-Life Balance directive. This legislation was heralded as a crucial impetus for improved work-family policy support, requiring all EU member states to provide fathers access to paid paternity leave as well as parents guaranteed access to parental leave and the right to request flexible working until a child’s eighth birthday. It also provided the first support for working caregivers, with access to unpaid leave. Although the directive was seen as an important first step in giving workers much-needed work-family support, in the years since its implementation, many European countries have struggled to prioritize further work-family policy support. Ongoing crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated policy efforts be directed elsewhere, with growing social inequality as a result. Against this background, we consider the state of work-family policy supports five years following the directive’s implementation. We analyse work-family policy supports in eight European countries (Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom) between 2019 to 2023. We study the extent to which countries go beyond the directive’s minimum requirements to provide real work-family support to workers in contemporary societies. Using an analytical framework conceptually grounded in the capability approach, we show how cross-country differences in policy support reduce or increase the real opportunities workers have to reconcile work and care in meaningful ways. We discuss these findings in light of potential future work-family policy solutions.