Managing time: the integration of caring and paid work by low-income families and the role of the UK's tax credit system

Jay Wiggan

Policy Studies, 2010, vol. 31, issue 6, 631-645

Abstract: Under the New Labour governments in the UK, successive reforms of the tax and benefit system sought to improve the financial benefits of paid work. Drawing on two waves of qualitative interviews with low-income working families this article examines the role of the UK tax credit system in shaping decisions about employment and unpaid care work. The article suggests that the financial support provided for lone-parent participants by the tax credit system enhanced their temporal autonomy, permitting participation in paid work to align more closely with temporally situated notions of parental responsibility for caring. For couple families however, parental perceptions of responsibility for pre-school children, along with childcare constraints and the structure of the tax credit system served to constrain the autonomy of the main carer and implicitly encourage a gendered specialisation in caring or employment.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01442872.2010.511527 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cposxx:v:31:y:2010:i:6:p:631-645

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cpos20

DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2010.511527

Access Statistics for this article

Policy Studies is currently edited by Toby James

More articles in Policy Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().