The work-family balance in collective agreements: more female employees, more provisions?

No one will question that the share of women working in the Dutch labour market increased over the last decades. It is also apparent that there is a rapid development of childcare and other work-family balance provisions in collective labour agreements (CLAs): either these provisions are being included in collective agreements, or existing provisions are being expanded. The reasons for this are obvious: from the employee’s point of view, childcare provisions make it interesting for women to join or stay in the labour market; from the employer’s point of view, although it may be a costly issue, these provisions may help attract and retain female employees.
The main question is the following: to what extent can the share of female employees covered by a CLA explain the presence of work-family provisions in CLAs? Furthermore, does the gender of the union negotiator have a significant additional affect?
The DUCADAM dataset, a digital database on collective labour agreements in the Netherlands, is used to tackle these questions. The findings show that the hypothesised relationships do not exist. Appar-ently, the supply of work-family provisions in CLAs is not a response to female employees’ demands, nor is it affected by the negotiator’s gender. Rather, economical factors seem to underlie work-family developments in CLAs, as indicated by the positive correlation between work-family provisions and yearly wage increase levels.