Introduction

Abstract

A senior vice president of human resources said recently, “Our problem is that our employment practices assume unlimited labor supply of white males with wives at home.“ These words aptly describe the disjunctiure between the employment practices in most of the industrialized West and the realities of the labor force. Work is structured to maximize the distance between work and family, and to minimize the intrusion of family into work life. Unfortunately, with demographics undergoing change, the employment relationship is under extraordinary pressure to change, too. The majority of new entrants to the U.S. work force during the next 15 years will be women, and the vast majority of these women will have young children at home. The same trends are true in most western industrialized countries, which lag behind the U.S. by 5–10 years.