ABSTRACT
Countries and cultures vary in the extent to which government is viewed as playing a role in encouraging or mandating workplace practices to support work and family (Lewis and Haas, 2005). In a world in which corporations operate internationally, and in which employees and the unions that represent them find themselves in 'competition' with employees in other countries, it is important to understand international differences in social mores and employer implementation of work and family policies. For example, although over the last several decades the USA has generally become more accepting of women's participation in paid employment and of fathers' involvement in early child care, an implementation gap persists where many legal and employer practices related to work and family have not fully caught up to labor market and societal changes (Barnett, 1999; Lewis and Haas, 2005). In this chapter we describe and contrast legal and employer approaches to work and family supports related to leave and time off from work for family, pregnancy and caregiving, in the USA, Canada, the European Union (EU) and selected countries in the EU. While the field of work and family has now broadened to include eldercare and time off from work for all employees regardless of whether they have caregiving responsibilities (Kossek and Lambert, 2005), due to space limitations we focus our review on policies relating to leave and caregiving.
