THE COMMODIFICATION OF LONE MOTHERS' LABOR: A COMPARISON OF US AND GERMAN POLICIES

Lisa Giddings, Irene Dingeldey and Susan Ulbricht

Feminist Economics, 2004, vol. 10, issue 2, 115-142

Abstract: Drawing on Gøsta Esping-Andersen's concept of commodification of labor, as well as on its feminist critiques, this paper looks at policy effects on lone mothers in the US and in Germany. With increasing labor market participation rates among lone mothers in the US following welfare reform and in Germany following unification, the authors conclude that the changes derive from different policies and incentive structures related to the state of commodification of labor in each country. In the former East Germany, the policy regime of generous childcare benefits enabled the commodification of women's labor, while in West Germany, the established policy regime was dominated by a strong, voluntary commodification of women's labor, particularly that of lone mothers. In contrast, US policy has been characterized by its greater degree of precommodification of women's labor, which was followed, after the welfare reform of 1996, by the enforced commodification of women's labor.

Keywords: Lone mothers; commodification; US; Germany; labor market policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1354570042000217748 (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:femeco:v:10:y:2004:i:2:p:115-142

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/1354570042000217748

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

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