We know this from studies conducted throughout the latter half of the 20th century. In the Nordic countries, a GDP increase of up to 20% was attributable to the participation of women in the workforce (OECD 2018). Measures implemented in the mid-1960s enabled them to retain their employment even after having children. In other words, women were considered more than domestic housekeepers who had primary child-rearing responsibility.
Today, relics of this mentality remain. Without legally binding work-life balance policies, many women are forced to choose between keeping their job and tending to their newborn baby, leaving families reliant on the single income of the second parent. Consequentially, a gender imbalance appears that makes it harder for second parents, mainly fathers, to be more involved with their family and harder for women to return to work afterwards.
What we succeeded in negotiating was the biggest step in bridging the economic gender gap in EU law in the last decade.
Effectively, by protecting the right for both parents to be involved in raising their children and by allowing for more flexible working arrangements, women are more able to keep their jobs, supplement their income and enjoy a better quality of life that makes working compatible with family life.
Work-life balance measures make economic sense, but not only. They are feminist, but not only. Thanks to the gender-neutral language of the Directive, all families can benefit, including same sex couples. But not only: businesses benefit, too.
When negotiating the Directive, SMEs were concerned about the financial cost of such measures. Legislative efforts were met with predictable reluctance from the business lobby about having to support absent workers. This has been a sentiment reported around the world and remains one of the biggest obstacles to the enjoyment of WLB measures in developed economies.
Fortunately, it is fraught with misconception.
1. PN in government will subsidise both parental and paternity leave
Right now, Malta ranks bottom among the EU member states that offer paternal leave in terms of duration. While fathers take away 100% of their pay, they are only entitled to one working day of paternal leave. Spain is leading the way with a whole 16 weeks, while other member states typically offer at least a week or two of fully or well-paid leave.
Under a PN government, fathers will see their leave rise from one to three weeks, subsidised fully by the state. Four months of parental leave will also be compensated, shared between both parents.
2. WLB measures raise productivity
Beauregard and Henry (2009) first found that work-life conflict was not in fact miraculously solved by work-life balance measures. But the added flexibility did make it easier for employees to manage their work responsibilities more effectively.
The study found that flexible measures were “often associated with improved organisation performance”. Work-life balance measures made employers more favourable in the eyes of employees, making them work more diligently and during their personal peak hours.
3. Companies: cost-neutral with positive returns
Leave programmes have a bad reputation, but in the Beauregard and Henry study, 84% of the companies surveyed reported no losses. More than half this number actually reported positive returns on their investment. This was also true for care-giving leave.
Among the benefits are: reduced absenteeism, reduced employee turnover, increased employee retention, increased attractiveness and increased productivity.
At best, they were cost-neutral with the aforementioned benefits. Conversely, companies without work-life balance measures could not evidence economic gains, but were associated with a negative working culture and lower employee wellbeing (De Ciere et al., 2005). Furthermore, new entrants into job market value work-life measures over slightly better pay.
A PN government subsidising leave will further alleviate any remaining financial strain, especially for SMEs.
4. Less turnover, more talent retention
Employees resigning their posts for family reasons has financial repercussions for everyone: a stream of income is lost with employees incurring more and more costs. In general, it makes more sense to retain current workers by a leave of absence than to look for new employees.
This is true even for prolonged leave, depending on the type of work. Retraining employees or better yet having flexible measures is still cheaper than vacant positions, recruitment costs, selection procedures, education and training and handover periods of reduced productivity.
Simply put, employers value good employees and employees value good employers. Work-life balance measures make it easier for both parties.
5. More job satisfaction, better management
Firms that exercised good management valued work-life balance measures for their employees. Better management results in a “robust, positive and significant correlation of productivity” according to Oxford University (Bloom and Van Reenan, 2006).
What better management means is more open communication between employer and employees, facilitating the means to communicate and ask for flexible working arrangements.
Communication costs nothing. If anything, implementing policies for flexible working arrangements require little resources to implement, with the promise of outsize benefits.
The Work-Life Balance Directive was a hard-fought battle that sought to balance out the interests of families, workers and employers. While I am very proud to have delivered substantially more rights for Maltese families, the next stage is implementation.
The PN promises to go beyond the Directive, to secure an even better investment in our families and to urgently decrease the gender gap in our country, which to this day is one of the highest in the EU.
One catch remains after the Directive is implemented in August 2022: for our nation to benefit from these rights, employers, employees, parents and carers must be prepared to use them.
David Casa is a Member and Quaestor of the European Parliament