Family Policy, Family Changes - Sweden, Italy and Britain Compared.
CIVITAS Institute for the Study of Civil Society, London. ISBN 1-903386-43-8
Chapter 2
Sweden:
Socialist Engineering in Family Policy

|
Chapter
2 of Patricia Morgan's book is published here by special consent of the
publishing house CIVITAS. |
1. The Present Situation
The main characteristics of family
formation in Sweden in recent decades are:
·
declining
marriage, more divorce, and rising cohabitation;
·
first
partnerships are formed at successively younger ages;
·
a
growth in people living alone;
·
steady
growth in one-parent families;
·
serial
monogamy and serial cohabitations are increasingly common;
·
the
percentage of births outside marriage is rising rapidly, and remains the
highest in the EU;
·
fertility
rates vary sharply, in response to pro-natalist policies;
·
suicide
rates are among the highest in the EU, exceeded only by Finland.
Family structure
The family
of a married couple with one or two children is the most common type in Sweden.
In the 1990 census, about 67 per cent of families with children were
married-couple-families, and about 15 per cent were unmarried couples.
Lone-parent families were around 20 per cent. Of individuals born between 1892
and the mid-1950s, about 85 per cent grew up with both biological parents until
16. Death was the main reason for not growing up with both parents. However, 24
per cent of children born in Sweden during the 1960s and around 29 per cent of
those born in 1970-76 no longer lived with both biological parents by age 16.
Living
alone has increased: by 1995, 21 per cent of those aged 16-74 were living
alone.
There is virtually no
adoption in Sweden. The state looks after children who cannot live with their
family, since professional educators and carers are preferred to parents. The
link with the family of origin is preserved as far as possible.
Marriage
Marriage in Sweden has become a pattern of serial monogamy and serial
cohabitations. The marriage rate in Sweden increased in the first half of the
twentieth century and up to the 1940s. It began to fall in the late 1940s, and
in 1967 a dramatic decline set in. In five years, marriages decreased from
60,000 per year to 40,000. Between 1966 and 1996 the annual marriage rate per
1,000 single women dropped by about a third. The marriage rate shot up in 1989,
due to a change in widows’ pension rules. (Widows’ pensions were abolished to
stop women depending on men, but women could still get them if they were born
before 1944 and married by 1989.) The median age at marriage has increased by
more than six years since the mid-1960s—in 1996, it was 32 for men and 29 for
women. In one in ten marriages in the 1950s and one in five in the 1980s, the
woman had been married before.
In the 1970s, it seemed that
replacement of marriage by cohabitation was taking place and there was no
overall decline in partnerships. Indeed, first partnerships were formed at
successively younger ages. In 1980, 78 per cent of women aged 20 to 24 in a
union cohabited. Of women aged 30-35 this was 28 per cent. Among women born in
1949, about 19 per cent married when entering their first union, while only
eight per cent of those born in 1964 married directly.
The propensity for younger
women to enter any union increased up to the 1990s, and then levelled off.
While women often married after cohabiting for a short time, women in more
recent cohorts are now more likely to separate than marry. The dissolution rate
for cohabitation is estimated to be two or three times higher than for
marriages.[i]
While about 20,000 marriages dissolve each year, the number of cohabiting couples
separating has increased from about 25,000 in 1981 to 30,000 for 1986-1991.
Comparisons of stable cohabiting couples with those who separate reveal little
or no socio-economic selection.[ii]
The increase of non-marital unions is contributing to ‘partnership
mobility’, in Sweden as elsewhere. These usually last for a short time (shorter
than was the case some years ago), and are often followed by successive unions.
The Swedes have the highest proportion of women aged 35-39 who have had three
or more live-in ‘partnerships’.[iii]
By 1994, about 40 per cent of all new unions involved at least one partner who
had been living with someone else before. However, the time between unions
means that more people remain unpartnered over the long term. However,
cohabitations still last longer than in Britain. It has been calculated that,
for women in the age range 20-39 years, dissolved cohabitations had a duration
of 29 months, compared with 19 in Britain. Cohabitants that led to marriage had
a duration of 48 months, compared with 17 in Britain.
Fewer low-status men are married and more are excluded from family
life.
Fertility trends
During the 1930s, Swedish fertility fell to a TPFR of only 1.7 children
per woman. In the 1940s, birth rates rose to replacement level. In the 1960s,
when birth rates were very high in the Anglophone world, the Swedish rate fell
back to just above 1.6. There was a dramatic upturn in the late 1980s and
1990s, as the TPFR rose to 2.14, the highest in Europe. Women had more children
and had them earlier, after policy changes allowed women to stay at home on
generous allowances during the children’s early years. In 1980, the mother (or
father) could stay at home with a child for a longer period of time if another
child was born within 24 months of the last one. In the 1970s, a woman only had
the right to a second period of maternity leave without returning to work if
the interval between births did not exceed 12 months—although it had already
lengthened with holiday and sick leaves. By the time the period was extended to
30 months, many parents could have two or three children reasonably close
together to take advantage of all the benefits and easily remain on paid leave
for five years or longer. This meant more births as well as reducing the interval
between births, with a big boost in second and subsequent births as the last
child reached two years of age. Women in their thirties had a fertility rate
higher than those in their twenties. The fertility rate of younger women then
started to rise as well, as several cohorts first put off childbearing and then
compensated for this, or brought births forward.
Birth rates fell back to a low level by the mid-1990s. The reason may
lie partly in cutbacks on wage replacement policies and other adverse economic developments
that threatened wages. Also, as in the UK in the 1970s, the very low birth rate
may have been due partly to the fact that young women had already brought their
birth plans forward and had their children. There was a reduction in the
number of couples having third children and a postponement of the birth of the
first child. The fall proved to be as temporary as the artificially induced
peak, for by 2000 the birth rate had recovered to 1.65—very slightly higher
than the UK.[iv]
Unwed births
Sweden already had a high illegitimacy rate at the end of the
nineteenth century (ten per cent) compared with other European countries,
partly because there was a surplus of women, as men migrated, and a very late
age at marriage, as people waited to inherit land.
In 1979, 35 per cent of births were out of wedlock compared with less
than ten per cent in Britain. Over 50 per cent of births are now outside
marriage, overwhelmingly within cohabitations. More first births are within
cohabitations than marriages. There appear to be fewer ‘single’ unwed births
than in Britain, where the unwed birth rate is higher than might be expected
from the rates of cohabitation. The overall proportion of women who had a child
prior to any union was seven per cent in Sweden in 1995 and there has not been
the upward movement seen in Britain. On the other hand, there has been an
upward movement in Sweden in first births post first partnership.[v]
There is also the role of cohabitation in driving birth rates down. As
elsewhere, cohabiting couples have fewer children than married couples. The
formation and disruption of these unstable relationships absorbs time in which
children might be conceived and born.
Abortion now deals with nearly 70 per cent of pregnancies out of
wedlock in Sweden.
Lone parents
Sweden had one of the highest proportions of lone mothers in Europe in
1979. The increase was greater in the UK in the 1990s, and it has now overtaken
Sweden. There is a much lower proportion of young lone mothers in Sweden, with
only eight per cent under 25 years old. As elsewhere, lone mothers have fewer
children than married mothers (63 per cent have only one child, compared with
37 per cent of married mothers in 1995).
However, more single cohabiting mothers marry than in Britain. France
and Britain have the lowest proportion of single, cohabiting mothers who marry,
at around one-third, while in Sweden it is 56 per cent within five years, and
70 per cent in Italy.[vi]
A high proportion of lone mothers are foreign born, or 20 per cent by
1995. Figures for 1990 show there are more children with lone parents in
blue-collar families (25 per cent live with a lone parent) compared with
white-collar families (17 per cent). As elsewhere, lone mothers are more likely
to be the less educated, low-ability women. Not only do women with higher
education have a considerably lower propensity to become lone mothers, but
higher earnings before the first child also reduce the risk of entering lone
motherhood.[vii]
Divorce as a springboard
Overall, the number of individuals experiencing family disruption (from
all sources) annually is 140,000-150,000 adults and children. The increasing
risks of union dissolution for women born after the late 1950s, in contrast to
women born before, is probably due to cohabitations increasing the separation
rate. Until the late 1980s, divorce was the main route into lone motherhood.
There was a gradual, continuous increase in divorce from the beginning
of the century. The divorce rate increased dramatically in the 1970s following
a change in the divorce law in 1974 that allowed divorce on request and at
short notice. No reason has to be given, and there is no wait unless there are
children (where there is a six month consideration period). Public interference
occurs in the case of property and custodial settlements if the couple cannot
agree. The annual divorce rate increased immediately by almost 70 per cent,
from 8.6 per 1,000 in 1973 to 14.5 per 1,000 marriages in 1974. As elsewhere,
after the legal change, the divorce rate dropped somewhat but settled at a far
higher level than before. In 1988, the Swedish divorce rate had dropped back to
10.8 per 1,000 married women to rise again by the mid-1990s. Other countries
have similar rates: Norway 9.4, Australia 10.8, England and Wales 12.7 in 1989,
New Zealand 12.0 in 1990, US 21.0 in 1988.
A factor in the divorce rate is unemployment: as elsewhere, women
expect men to be the main breadwinner and reject men who cannot offer much
financial support. Amongst children born into marital or cohabiting unions that
subsequently became marital unions, there is little difference in the chances
of children seeing their parents’ relationship break up by their fifth
birthday. This is unlike Britain and the US, where children with parents who
married from cohabitation are more likely to see their parents split than those
born into marriage.
Cohabitation as a springboard
As elsewhere, because cohabitation has such a high dissolution rate
compared with marriages, and because cohabitation has become a common way to
live, it becomes a leading engine behind the expansion of lone parenthood.
According to the cohort study using the Fertility and Family Surveys, 93 per
cent of marital unions survive five years after the birth of the first child,
compared with 75 per cent of cohabitations (compared with only 48 per cent in
Britain).[viii]
Moreover, previously cohabiting mothers are much less likely to enter a new
union compared with those who have been married. Contrary to assumptions about
Sweden in the UK, cohabitations have not become equal to marriage in longevity
and stability.
2. The Historical Background
These trends paint a picture of increasing social fragmentation.
Nonetheless, Sweden has the reputation as the beacon of enlightenment and
progress in Europe. One demo-legend has it that Sweden is living proof that
cohabitations are as durable as marriages. Another has it that Swedish
experience proves that lone parents and their children are more than equal to
two-parent families and their children in all outcomes, so long as they get
proper support. Sweden ‘proves’ that young children do better when they go to
day care, rather than being reared by mothers at home, and so on. Policy analysts
turn to Sweden ‘as a widely touted example of modern family policy, a system
that recognises the social transformations made necessary by the commitment to
gender equality and the full industrialisation of social life… the purest model
for a regime of day care, progressive schooling, paid paternal leave... which
reconciles the need for human reproduction with the drive for gender equality.’[ix]
Sweden’s welfare state is the model to emulate. The present bias is to classify
welfare/fiscal or family policies in such a way as to juxtapose the ideal of
the dual-career family who share household duties with the horror of the male
breadwinner family and its rigid role segregation. Policies which do not aim to
engineer the former are seen as setting out to subjugate women in the latter.
The only enlightened policy has become one which gives women equal access to
jobs in the labour market, financial independence and high quality subsidised
childcare services, so that they never have to choose between a job and having
children. This perspective is promoted by Swedish social scientists (as well as
policy-makers), who ‘have devised several classifications of welfare states
that always place the modern Nordic welfare state at the apex of typologies, as
the best practice model’.[x]
They demand that it must also be exported everywhere else, and it has long been
favoured by UK establishment feminists, in and out of government. In 1996,
Allan Larsson, Director General of DGV (Directorate General V, responsible for
Employment, Industrial Relations and Social Affairs) in the European
Commission, complained that women’s work-rates in the EU were still lower than
men’s. He insisted that the days of the male breadwinner had gone and dismissed
the ‘old social contract’ with a division of responsibilities between spouses
as ‘no longer valid’. Effectively, he demanded that the ‘traditional’ sexual
division of labour must be outlawed, and the Swedish model extended to all in
Europe, irrespective of preferences.[xi]
Sweden has been cast as the prime example of the ‘maximalist welfare
state’. Its project is to ‘put people’s lives straight by defining the content
of the good life and controlling the institutional instruments leading to it’.
There is even an official list of names from which babies must be named.[xii]
The justification for such far-reaching intervention and attempts to shape
people’s fundamental choices in life rests on assumptions that someone knows
better than the individuals concerned what the good life is and how it can be
achieved. Not least, this has involved the comprehensive political control of
family life, where Sweden has made just about the most concerted attempt in
history to engineer the freedom of women from child-rearing responsibilities
and the demise of the traditional family through economic manipulation, social
pressures, and massive public re-education.
In 1968, Sweden became the first country in the world to frame a
government policy of achieving equality between the sexes by changing the role
of men as well as that of women. In a statement to the United Nations that year
the Swedish government had declared that it was not enough to guarantee women
their rights. All legislation and all social policy must support a shift from
man-the-breadwinner and woman-the-homemaker to a society of independent
individuals and of partnerships in which all tasks were shared.[xiii]
In the new century, the remaking of the sexes has been joined by the
attempt to equalise ‘sexualities’. Books and other media marketed to Swedish
schools containing ‘unsatisfactory or discriminatory passages concerning
homosexuality or bisexuality’ are destined for the bonfire. To this end, the
National Academy for Education is conducting an extensive review of all
schools to determine how principals choose and use textbooks. Schools are now
‘empowered’ to ‘integrate gender equality and sexual orientation issues into
their operations and everyday tasks’. As any criticism or objection to the
complete normalisation of homosexuality is tacitly defined as psychological
abnormality, research is meant to focus upon how ‘norms and attitudes make
homophobia possible’ even where there are ‘no statistics or consistent studies
which can pinpoint discrimination due to sexual orientation’.[xiv] Making what may
be regarded as offensive statements about homosexuality or homosexuals merits
a prison term.
One of the last places in Europe to give anyone the franchise, Sweden
is essentially an authoritarian, culturally (and genetically) homogeneous, and
small-scale society, with traditions of strong, centralised government, and
minimal citizen participation. The cultural and racial homogeneity are largely
a function of its small size. As shown in Tables 1 and 2 (pp. 7-10), Sweden is
one of the six smallest countries in the EU, whereas Italy and Britain are
among the four largest. Historically, little or nothing in the way of
intermediate stages or groups developed between a fairly egalitarian and
primitive clan-based peasantry and the monarchy. There have been no autonomous
trading cities, no merchant classes, no nobility to challenge the state, whose
position of power and direct hold over the people has no counterpart elsewhere
in Western Europe. This all endowed the expansion of the state and its
educative pretensions with a natural legitimacy, and furthered the introduction
of collectivist perspectives which demanded strong institutional uniformity
and subordinated the rights of the individual to the best interests of the
community.[xv]
Sweden quickly took to twentieth century collectivist notions of the rule of
‘expert’ elites, possessed of a superior knowledge, of how best people should
live.
Added to this, the ‘mature industrialism’ which took root in the early
twentieth century was a ‘paradoxical and highly unstable combination of market
and command economy’. In 1870 three-quarters of the population were engaged in
fishing, farming and forestry, and only nine per cent in manufacturing or
crafts. (In Britain, 45 per cent of the labour force were in industry at that
time.) Sweden had no coal, but developed hydro-electricity, which led to very
rapid economic growth. The ‘big factories of mass production were veritable
plan and command economies in miniature. Their organisational principles were
strictly hierarchic and their top-down chain of command as explicit as in
military organisations’.[xvi]
The commanding organisational rationality of big business helped inspire the
‘social Fordism’ that was repudiated in the USA, but favoured in Germany, the Soviet
Union and Sweden, or countries with more corporatist and hierarchic traditions.
The Swedish welfare state was to develop along lines which reproduced the
centralist and standardised principles of mass manufacturing big industry, the
happy factory, or cybernetic Utopia.
Like democracy, Sweden came late to many developments in sexual
equality and family law. ‘Modernisation’ meant the telescoping of the two
phases of reform that elsewhere occurred between 1880 and 1900 and then between
1960 and 1975, with Sweden being much later with some and much earlier with
other measures. Until 1920, married women had no control over their own
earnings, which belonged to the husband. Until 1909, there was no civil
marriage. However, illegitimacy as a legal entity was abolished in 1917, not
out of radicalism, but because of the ways in which stigmatisation was adding
to the problems surrounding children born out of wedlock and their mothers.
Liberal divorce laws were introduced in the 1920s and extended in 1974. Homosexuality
was decriminalised in 1944. Compulsory sex education was introduced into
schools in 1956.
Pronatalism
The impetus behind the family policy measures of the 1930s-1960s was
population maintenance, given the low birth rates of the pre-war period. Over a
million Swedes left the country between 1860 and 1914, mainly for the USA.
There was concern over population shrinkage, as the net fertility rate fell
below one in 1927—although it is now alleged that the fertility decline was
overstated.[xvii] The low
birth rate resulted, to a not inconsiderable extent, from a low marriage rate
and a high proportion of unmarried women. The same was true of the illegitimacy
rate. Migration, plus the need to inherit land before marrying, depleted the
supply of marriageable men, reduced further by the Great Depression.[xviii]
Swedish pro-natalism owed much to Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s 1934 book Crisis in the Population Question, which
provided a pertinent analysis of reproduction in a capitalist society.[xix]
They argued that, since having children was (irreversibly) voluntary, and based
on a living standard criteria, birth rates would probably continue to fall
unless something was done to equalise the financial status of those with and
without this burden. Those who produced children were massive contributors to
the upkeep and perpetuation of the nation, in whom it should invest heavily to
secure its future. The Myrdals spoke prophetically of how the long-term
development of the proposed welfare state, which would include provisions for
the aged as well as children, might add dramatically to anti-family pressures
which discouraged the birth of children by passing massive resources and
influence to the elderly.
Old age pensions stripped children of economic value and reversed the
incentives structure. It had become rational for people to avoid the expense of
children, while hoping that others will be foolish enough to rear the children
who would later pay for everyone’s retirement. Young people were required to
support the retired and the needy through the welfare system as well as the
children to whom they gave life. Consequently, they reduced the number of
children because it was the only factor over which they had any control. In
contrast to the neo-Malthusians, who saw increased living standards as the
result of population decline, it was argued that an aging population would mean
more medical and welfare costs falling on a decreasing number of economically
active people, as the economy contracted with falling demand and less capital formation.
Also to consider as the aged inherited the earth, was the prospect of the
debilitating and stultifying power of the elders.
The Myrdals wrested the population question away from conservatives and
nationalists and turned it towards the service of socialist goals. ‘With
exquisite timing, the Myrdals offered the [Social Democratic] party a wildly
popular, politically effective, scientifically justified response to what had
been seen as an unsolvable problem, and they went on to reshape their nation.’[xx]
As transformers of the Swedish state, their achievement knows few parallels.
They epitomised the collectivist social engineer who manages society according
to scientific principles for constructive ends. To the elite expert, existing
social life was just ‘the illogical result of human choices; at any moment we
could decide whether to maintain or change it’. Distinctions ‘between facts and
values were blurred and jargon became a convenient cover for political goals’.[xxi]
As the Myrdals pursued ‘social revolution they foreclosed other options and
possibilities and so served as progenitors of the post-family welfare state’.[xxii]
Calling for a ‘forced march into modernity as the only hope for
families and children’, the Myrdals linked voluntary parenthood, sex education
and birth control to the feminist theme of women’s full engagement in the
labour market and thence to the nationalist desire to ensure population
stability. Gunnar Myrdal himself had an authentic desire to increase the birth
rate, while Alva was more committed to a gender role revolution, achieved
through the use of the population issue as a political tool. Both saw the
radical-conservative consensus on the population question as the crowbar for
the socialisation of Sweden. Only sex would be left to individuals and the hope
was that this would secure enough children to fund the whole enterprise.
Importing the revolution
Before it erupted in the West in the late 1960s, the doctrinal base for
sexual liberation and gender equality was laid in Sweden by the same body of
feminists influential in the early Soviet Union’s programme for sexual freedom.
Both communists and social democrats, supported by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, were
part of the interwar functionist movement which attacked the garden cities of England
and the workers’ apartments of Europe as incompatible with women’s employment
and freedom from ‘household drudgery’. Even if it was ‘inspired by socialist
sympathies’, the low-cost housing built in Western Europe between the two world
wars did not have as its goal the remodelling of the family or society, but the
amelioration of an ugly by-product of capitalism—the squalid slums of the
industrial cities. ‘The [limited] goals were space, hygiene and fresh air.’[xxiii]
Embracing Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living’, the Myrdals and other
policy-makers wanted the ‘collective house’ to house the new people, with the
women at work, the children in care centres, and social workers and educators
overseeing everything. The family dilemma in Western society would be resolved—on
Friedrich Engels’s terms—by the development of more ‘efficient’ forms of
child-rearing better suited to the industrial age. Daycare and summer camps
would be less expensive than supporting the antiquated and maladaptive family
where children were exposed to a damaging psychological atmosphere. The
‘falsely individualistic desire’ of parents for the ‘freedom’ to raise their
own children was unhealthy. It was ‘based on a sadistic disposition to extend
this “freedom” to an unbound and uncontrolled right to dominate others’.[xxiv]
In the collective nursery, small children would be cared for twenty fours hours
a day by highly trained personnel, in hygienic conditions, with pedagogically
correct playthings. (This is not far from the ‘children’s centres’ envisaged by
the Blair government as an outcrop of the Sure Start programme, where children
can stay from early morning to evening while the parent works.)
In these conditions, women would have more children. If there were not
enough jobs, then public works, sound economic planning and a growing economy
would create enough for everybody. The blueprint was for communities where
‘property was owned jointly, work was shared, food was prepared in common, and
children brought up together’. Men and women would then ‘be equal and
independent, and sexual morality... not defined by legal norms’. The ‘aim was
to break the bonds that private property and conventional family ties imposed
on the development of the individual in a free society’. Collective
housekeeping was ‘not just a convenience for women but... part of the structure
necessary for creating socialist relationships’.[xxv]
In turn, reducing the time together in the home would undermine the
influence of parents on their children’s development.
For the reformers, a rational allocation of resources meant benefits in
kind, or as ‘social consumption’ rather than cash. Otherwise, family allowances
might be added to the main family budget, rather than spent directly on the
children. Society must assume most of the child support function, financed by
taxes on the whole population, and dispense free meals, free medical care,
clothing, infant care, ‘modern, hygienic furniture’ and so forth. Such
collectivised programmes would prove cheaper, more effective and adequate in
meeting need, than individual choice, and allowed for social transformation
through the removal of independent action. Ordinary people lacked the sense to
know what was good for them. Consumption, the last economic function left to
the family, must be socialised.[xxvi]
The Myrdals dominated political and social discourse in the interwar
period to the extent that to engage in sexual intercourse was ‘to Myrdal’ and a
sofa was a ‘Myrdal couch’.[xxvii]
But the reform programme, with its daycare for children, went beyond the
confines of Social Democratic policy-making and opinion in the 1930s and 1940s.
Actual family policy reforms included free maternity care in public clinics,
rent rebates according to family size, child tax allowances, marriage loans and
employment protection for mothers. In 1948, family allowances for all children
were introduced to replace child tax allowances. Many of these measures existed
in the UK, such as maternity care and child health measures; family allowances
were introduced in Britain in 1943, and ran alongside child tax allowances
until 1979. Policies supporting full employment through Keynesian manipulation
were also common pro-family measures throughout the post-war Anglophone
world—as in Australia and New Zealand. However, in Sweden, a more explicit
pro-natalist population policy, allied with Keynesian counter-cyclical public
expenditure policies, specifically legitimated the expansion of the welfare
state. The goal was to increase fertility by 25 per cent, and to improve the
quality of the next generation by improvements in child welfare. As elsewhere,
pronatalism and the preservation of the nation were not then deemed to be
racist or fascist.
From the time that Swedish welfare programmes were first constructed in
the 1930s, there was much concern, not just with horizontal equity, but with
the vertical redistribution that was eschewed in the Anglophile world. The
welfare state was seen as an instrument of equality, rather than simply a
device for easing pressure at various points in the life cycle.
Social engineering: the feminist paradise
By the 1960s, the goal of achieving a real redistribution of wealth, or
even a reduction in income differentials through full employment and measures
for non-earning members of society, seemed even further off. Inequalities had
widened. Opportunities for advancement went to those who already had
opportunities, while grants, loans and tax breaks for enterprise increased the
wealth gaps. Victims of a ‘new poverty’ were principally those with children,
and especially lone parents, big families and immigrants. What was
‘redistributed’ back to parents was little compared with what they paid in
taxes to finance benefits and services (plus the administrative costs) that
went primarily to others—especially the retired. By 1958, pensioners were
receiving a higher income than members of families with dependent children.
Sweden saw much the same upsurge in crime in the 1960s as other Western
countries; lower than the UK, France and the Netherlands, but higher than
Germany, Italy and Austria.
The contemporary counter-cultural upheaval in the Anglophone world was
re-cycling feminist and socialist perspectives from the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century—perspectives that already had greater prominence and
success in Sweden.
The debate on class equality was joined by a re-vamped gender debate,
dominated by progressive sociologists and psychologists. By now, ‘social
parenting’ was a definite pre-requisite for a liberated sexuality which was
incompatible with child-rearing based in marriage. With reformers preoccupied
with class and gender equality, the aim was a society where individuals,
undefined by sex, marriage, or parenthood, were never dependent upon anybody
else, and in continuous full-time work regardless of marital and parental
status. The Erlander Report,[xxviii]
adopted by the Swedish Social Democrats in 1964, and supported by communists
and liberals, insisted that government powers over industry and education were
to be used to eliminate sex discrimination, sex-determined choices of
occupation, and to set up childcare. In comparison, moves to diminish the
conflict between work and family merely perpetuated the idea that women’s task
was homemaking and the care of children. There must be no ‘right to choose’
between home and career at any time in life, and men and women must unavoidably
have the same obligations. People did not know their own minds; they were just
‘culturally conditioned’ and frozen into an impoverishing mould.
With the goals being the sameness of contribution and equality of
outcome, attained by the break-up of the sexual division of labour in the home,
and equal opportunities and affirmative action policies outside, the Social
Democrats’ women’s organisation got them incorporated into the party’s
‘Programme for Equality’, adopted in 1969. It involved a sleight of hand and
was never really debated publicly. The programme was presented as having
something for everyone, so the inclusion of women, or the social engineering of
the new women and new men, remained largely implicit.
Everybody working
The reduction of poverty was sought through wages policy, in the
context of the pursuit of full employment. This is not the ‘living wage’ policy
pursued by governments and trade unions in Anglophile countries from the
mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century—the aim of ensuring male
breadwinners an income sufficient to keep a smallish family at a modest but
adequate living standard. Instead, with the aim of keeping all parents in
employment there had to be the same remuneration, as well as employment and
family work patterns, for both sexes. Twinned with the goal of reducing gender
inequality was one of equalising income between family types. This itself was
part of ensuring equality across classes. Labour shortages dictated that all
women had to work, to avoid the need for immigration, with its consequent
social problems. (Other countries, like the UK and Germany, imported labour
from less developed countries.)
To engineer these outcomes, unmarried and married couples were treated
alike in respect of tax assessment, housing allowances and child benefit.
Individual taxation of spouses replaced joint taxation in 1971. The principle
of family equity as applied fiscally—that income be taxed in proportion to the
numbers dependent upon it—was annulled on the grounds that nobody should rely
on anybody else, and children were preferably reared by the state.
‘Social democrats sacrificed one of their most hallowed principles...
in order to force a tax on the imputed income of the homemaker and to drive all
mothers into the marketplace.’[xxix]
As an added penalty on mutual support, a family with only one earner received a
lower housing benefit than one with the same net income earned by two. Housing
benefit is paid per person. Since 1995, a ‘partner’ with no income is not
entitled to any housing benefit, so that the couple will have an income limit
under a half that allowed a lone parent.
With very high progressive taxation, it became impossible (as intended)
to live on one wage, and more economically advantageous for the woman to work,
than for the man to work longer hours or get more remunerative work. The
resultant high female work-rates have been interpreted as reflecting women’s
preferences for paid work over family work and for financial independence over
interdependence with a spouse.
All in the crčche
To put further pressure on both parents to work, subsidised day-care
became the main form of ‘help’ for families. The state took on, and socialised,
many family responsibilities to a degree unseen outside of the Soviet bloc, not
least the rearing of children in crčches (ideally) or with minders.[xxx]
To rid the world of sex roles was not only an educational endeavour, it also
demanded intervention into personality development and attitudes. Given
assumptions about the overwhelming role of early experience, pre-school care
offered the opportunity to combat early differences in the personalities of the
sexes while parents were occupied at work.[xxxi]
Parenthood was separated from marriage, and the word ‘custodian’
adopted to designate the person immediately responsible for a child. These
custodians are acting for the state which ‘is not only the supervisor but also
the agency which creates the conditions under which mothers and fathers are
acting as parent’.[xxxii]
An ‘aspect of the integration of paid work and parenting is that in child
development and education, parental work must be shared with paid
professionals. The professionals do their job as paid work, which means that
the rules of their working organisations and labour unions set certain limits
on parental influence’.[xxxiii]
While parents are expected to go to meetings at daycare centres ‘to be
informed about the situation and the plans for the daycare centres and the
children… Parents are generally not supposed to interfere... In school there
are even fewer possibilities to influence the way children are taken care of
and the education they get. All in all, there is a loss of parental control
over the development of the child.’[xxxiv]
The public care system, introduced in the 1960s, covers about 50 per
cent of children aged six or under (school starts at seven years of age), and
about a third of under-threes are cared for in municipal nurseries or by
salaried childminders. Fees at day-care centres are heavily subsidised and
amount to around 10-15 per cent of the actual costs. They are determined
separately in each municipality. A place in a centre cost about two thirds of
the average gross wage by the mid-1980s. Lone parents have generally had
priority for places, even if they do not work, at reduced rates. The proportion
of children in public daycare is higher for lone- than for two-parent families.
By the 1990s, almost half of children with two parents used municipal childcare
compared with three-quarters of children with lone parents.
Childminders have to look after at least four children full-time, or
eight to ten part-time, to get their salary. One reason so many children still
go to childminders is that many municipalities only admit children needing
full-time care to nurseries, since nursery places are too costly to use
part-time. Another reason is the need to meet targets for daycare coverage,
which has meant registering unofficial or ‘black day mothers’ as salaried
childminders (many are women trying to finance the rearing of their own
children by taking in other people’s at a knock-down price). The local
authority hires the mother by inserting a subsidy into the system that helps
her to pay her taxes while staying at home. Unlike the nurseries, childminders
only have to meet minimal standards to be approved.
There has been some conflict between local authorities and the central
government over the expansion of institutional daycare, and in some
municipalities by the 1990s lone mothers only had priority for places if they
were employed. The availability of ‘socialised’ childcare has been patchy
compared with both aspirations and proclamations, not least because it turned
out to be the most unimaginably expensive and inefficient way to look after
children. The necessary resources, not least in terms of trained personnel,
were simply not there. Although daycare became the largest single item on many
municipal budgets by the 1970s, and the construction and staffing of a network
of care facilities proceeded apace (the number of nursery places increased
ten-fold between 1970 and 1980), the timescale for national coverage of all
pre-school children was continually revised.
There are objections to the removal of childcare from unemployed
parents on the grounds that this violates the UN Convention on the Rights of
the Child. It is seen as discriminatory that children are denied something as
fundamental to their development and freedom as childcare purely because of
their parents’ work status.[xxxv]
The benefits system
Benefits in kind, or as ‘social consumption’ rather than cash, allowed
for social transformation through the removal of independent action and choice.
Applications to deal with child poverty by paying municipal family allowances
(a tradition in the Germanic and Scandinavian world) to ‘unfavoured’ families
(i.e. those without a working mother), which might in part compensate for the
daycare subsidies they had paid for but did not use, were disallowed.
A strict ‘availability for work’ test has been applied to the
unemployed, with no allowance for lone parents or anyone’s childcare
responsibilities. (In Britain, there are relatively weak work tests, so a lone
parent does not have to work until the youngest child is 16.) In Sweden,
parenting is allowed for in the employment programme, but it is a break from a
career. Work is not supposed to be fitted around a family. Instead, allowances
are made for families in employment.
Public transfers are strongly income-redistributive, and many services
are heavily subsidised or free of charge. Transfer and insurance schemes are
usually universal. Unlike other redistributist welfare regimes, real or
aspirational, policy has generally avoided means-testing, or has not focused on
it. The few means-tested benefits, like the housing allowance and social
benefit, have not been a big aspect of the welfare system and, unlike
elsewhere, do not have so much impact on labour supply. There is a universal
child allowance, with a supplement for the second child. Child allowances have
largely kept pace with retail prices, adding about five per cent per child to
the gross earnings of the industrial worker. In 1996 the amount was reduced. By
1997 the level of family allowance and the supplement for the second child were
restored. At the time of writing the family allowance is €105 a month, with a
€28 supplement for the third child, €84 for the fourth child, and €105 for each
subsequent child.
However, payments in kind and, particularly, income replacement during
maternity/parental leave account for more than 65 per cent of all family
benefits in countries like Denmark and Sweden. Cash family benefits account for
only 30 per cent of all child/family benefits, compared to well over 50 per
cent in Italy and the UK.[xxxvi]
Parental leave
Parental leave income replacement programmes were introduced in 1974.
In 1989, the duration of paid leave became 60 weeks. Payment during leave was
75 per cent to 90 per cent of earnings for 48 weeks, and then a minimum
guaranteed amount. The rate for the first 48 weeks fell to 85 per cent in 1995
and to 75 per cent in 1996; to return to 80 per cent in 1998. The ‘eligibility
interval’ also expanded, so that if a woman bears the next child within this
interval, she is entitled to exactly the same benefits that she received for
her previous birth. The interval rose from 12 months in 1974-77 to 30 months in
1986. In the 1970s, a woman had only the right to a second period of maternity
leave without returning to work if the interval between births did not exceed
12 months—although it had already lengthened with holiday and sick leaves. With
the period extended to 30 months, many parents could have two or three children
reasonably close together to take advantage of all the benefits and easily
remain on paid leave for five years or longer.
Since after-tax income does not allow one parent to stay home with
children, the economy of the family is very much dependent upon the woman
having a paid job—the insurance money from parental leave is aimed at refunding
the income lost from paid work, not for having children to look after.
In 1995, one month of Swedish parental leave was earmarked for the
father, since mothers were using most days (90 per cent or more in 1993-96).
Despite all the propaganda and various pressures, men do not usually take
parental leave, and role reversal is very rare. Men’s use of parental leave is
also low elsewhere: one per cent in Norway, two per cent in Denmark, three per
cent in Iceland, with a maximum of 13 per cent in Finland. Most mothers prefer
not to share the care of a newborn with the father.[xxxvii] So men
are being made to ‘care’, like it or not. Three-quarters of mothers and fathers
were opposed to compelling men to take parental leave.[xxxviii] The new
rule made little impact. By the late 1990s, fathers were still taking only 11
per cent of leave days, and half took none at all. Most of those men who took
it worked in the public sector and had wives in high-status jobs. Despite all
the enthusiasm for Swedish role reversal in the UK press, it is not a reality
even in Sweden, only rhetoric.[xxxix]
The work environment is hostile to workers in key posts or with special skills
taking so much time off.
The parental leave system is used by more two-parent families than lone
parents. In 1993, this was 93 per cent compared to 55 per cent. Until the child
is 12 years old, parents are allowed to take time off work to stay at home when
the child is ill, at the rate of 75 per cent of earnings, up to a maximum of 60
days per year.
In January 2002, the parental leave scheme was changed, to add a second
daddy-month, on top of the existing allowance rather than at the expense of the
mother’s allowance. In January 2003, the income guarantee level was raised
again. The objectives of the reform were to enhance an early and close contact
between father and child; to reduce employer discrimination against fathers
and mothers on parental leave; and to promote a less unequal division of household
and childcare responsibilities in order to achieve less unequal labour market
outcomes. It was believed that increasing daddy-months in parental leave would
have the long-term effect of reducing occupational segregation and the pay gap.
Evaluation studies show a slightly increased fathers’ use of parental leave,
although this still remains very low, at 17 per cent of all the leave available
to couples—a very slow increase from seven per cent in 1987. However the
biggest effect was to persuade most fathers to take at least a few days’ leave,
rather than none at all. Before the change, over half of all new fathers took
no daddy-leave days off work. After the change, total non-use was reduced to 20
per cent. One-third of new fathers took one month off work. Surprisingly, the
change had no impact at all on fathers’ propensity to take time off to care for
a sick child. Many fathers simply used the extra leave to top up their summer
holiday and Christmas holiday allowances. Peak times for the use of daddy-leave
days are in August and late December, especially as they can be taken at any
time up to the child’s eighth birthday.[xl] Anecdotal
evidence suggests that fishing trips are more popular than changing nappies.
Undeterred, the government is considering whether to force fathers to take
one-third of all parental leave. However, it is reluctant to push through the
change, because it could be sufficiently unpopular to be a vote-loser.
Double income for lone mothers?
A problem with these arrangements is that equal pay and employment for
men and women results in a living standard based on double incomes. This
defeats the aim of equalising outcomes for lone- and two-parent families—since
lone mothers only have one income to rely on. So the state makes a ‘child maintenance
advance’ for lone parents, paid by the Social Insurance Office, which tries to
claim a proportion of it back from the absent parent. The payment is additional
and above the rate of child allowance.[xli] The
government recovers about a third of the expenditure from fathers—something
that became a matter of some debate in the 1990s. There are no such guaranteed
payments in Britain, although they are an aim of the lone-parent lobby (and
were proposed by the Finer Committee[xlii]). In
Sweden, as in Britain, mothers on public assistance do not benefit from
maintenance unless the payment lifts income above the benefit line. Giving lone
mothers double incomes means that couples on one wage are going to be worse off
than lone parents. With two children and average earnings, a lone parent in
Sweden in 1996 was 35 per cent better off than a one-earner couple on average
earnings. However, on a half of average earnings, the lone parent would have 92
per cent of the net income of the couple.
How much has it cost?
In order for the state to provide services socially that otherwise
would be privately provided in the family, many ordinary, everyday personal
services must be reckoned in monetary terms, tax revenues raised to finance
them, and complex rules and conditions imposed to limit undesirable side
effects.[xliii]
In 1960, ‘real social expenditure’ in Sweden was around 16 per cent of GDP,
just above average for OECD countries. In 1981, ‘real social expenditure’
accounted for almost 34 per cent of GDP, exceeded only by Belgium and the
Netherlands. In the years 1975-1981, real social welfare spending increased
four times as fast as the economy as a whole, and twice as fast as the OECD
average in that period. Sweden’s general government outlay as a share of
national output amounted to 59 per cent by 2003—a rise of nearly 28 per cent
from 1960, with an estimated restrictive effect on output of 390 per cent.[xliv]
By the late 1970s, a skilled worker on the average wage paid 50 per cent income
in taxation—down to over 40 per cent in the late 1980s (34.2 per cent in
2000/2001 at an average production wage and 42.6 at twice average earnings).[xlv]
Employers still pay around 40 per cent payroll tax for social welfare. The
Swedish tax take has been overtaken by Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands
in the twenty-first century (if the employer’s social security liability is
excluded).[xlvi]
In practice, only a limited portion of what is paid as tax is redistributed
between different groups; the ‘greater part really goes into a whirligig which
transforms our money into political power over ourselves’.[xlvii] By 1990,
the public sector accounted for 37 per cent of the labour force—more than
manufacturing industry (20 per cent). Similarly, in Denmark the number of
female homemakers declined by 579,000 between 1960 and 1982, as the number of
employees in the public sector grew by 532,000, with most of the growth in
daycare, elder care, hospitals and schools.[xlviii]
The Swedish system has been characterised as a system where the private
sector maintains nominal control over its capital and labour, but the returns
on the factors of production are so heavily circumscribed by regulations,
directives and taxes that the state, or public sector, ends up effectively controlling
them. A ‘sham form of mixed economy’, it has traditionally been associated
with Fascist regimes. This kind of gelenkte
Wirtschaft (joined up) economy is popular with politicians and bureaucrats
because all sectors of society are forced to keep on good terms with the state
and its functionaries if they are to remain in business. Such ‘Third Way’
economies seem to be capable of generating good growth in their early years, as
GNP is boosted by the public spending component. They eventually slow down and
seize up as investors become aware of the ways in which their returns are being
expropriated. All the regulations and controls create inefficiencies that, in
turn, lead to more controls, until a point is reached when deregulation becomes
necessary if the system is to survive.[xlix]
A perennial justification for
putting all women into the labour force and into more productive work than
childrearing is that this will make everyone richer: ‘To the extent that female
participation remains at depressed levels due to market failures and policy
distortions, (sic) removing these
could lead to higher levels of welfare.’[l] In Sweden,
between the mid-1970s to mid-1990s, disposable income increased by around 18
per cent, reckoned per consumption unit after taxes and transfers. Most of the
increase is attributable to the roughly equivalent rise in employment rates
among women, with rising incomes concentrated among joint households,
particularly middle-aged (30-64 years) and childless households.[li]
But there was little growth in real incomes for full-time employees (three per cent).
People have simply been made to put more labour onto the market. They expend
double the effort and are disabled from cooperating to exploit any division of
labour or to specialise. If Swedish women take care of each other’s children in
exchange for others taking care of theirs, how much additional output can come
out of this?
3. Have the Policies Worked?
Has Sweden solved the ‘lone parent’ problem?
In the UK, as throughout the Anglophone world, lone parents tend to
rely heavily on public assistance, to be disproportionately economically
inactive and to have a high proportion of their number under, at, or around
the poverty threshold. It is repeatedly claimed that lone parents could be
self-supporting if only they had the childcare and the jobs. Only lack of these
is stopping them from working full-time, which they are supposedly desperate to
do. Indeed, some have gone so far as to claim that the state could make a
profit from providing childcare, which will get mothers off benefits and paying
taxes instead.
Sweden has done more or less everything every good progressive says it
should do to put mothers into work, abolish lone-parent poverty, rid them of
dependence on the state or means-tested subsidies and ensure equal outcomes for
different ‘family forms’. It allows us to test the hypothesis that it is
marriage and children that make women poor. In this view, lone parents are not
at risk of poverty because one person has all the parental functions. Instead,
it is the family and its division of labour that are the main cause of the high
poverty among lone mothers. Their plight mirrors and concentrates women’s difficulties
as an economically disadvantaged group compared with husbands and fathers.
Society could easily arrange to pass babies onto a child-rearing agency. This
would get rid of women’s caring penalty (that is, all the money lost while
looking after others), and enable them to accumulate greater income for themselves.[lii]
So has the Swedish model lived up to expectations?
The growth in poverty
Compared with their position elsewhere, Swedish policy on lone parents
is a success, since their poverty rate is low. In 1982-87, there was no
significant difference between lone and couple-mothers in the prevalence of
poverty. At this time, 23 per cent of children in lone-parent families lived in
homes with below 40 per cent of the adjusted median income. This drops to two
per cent when post-tax and transfer incomes are compared. For children in
two-parent families this is 1.5 per cent. In the USA, at the same time, 54 per
cent of children with lone parents experienced both low post-tax and transfer
incomes.
In Sweden and Norway, lone-parent families had 85 per cent of the
adjusted (equivalised) disposable income of members of two-parent families in 1995.
In Germany, France and the UK it was between 65 and 76 per cent, and below 60
per cent in Australia, Canada and the US. The
difference was due to the universal child allowance, an advanced maintenance
benefit, subsidised childcare and parental leave insurance. A strong
contributory factor for lone parents’ low incomes in other countries is that
means-tested benefits serve as negative incentives for employment, or (for
those in employment) for moving from part-time to full-time work, or otherwise
increasing earnings.
However, a large number of Swedish lone mothers have incomes only
slightly above the poverty line. In the 1990s, Sweden saw a rise in poverty
rates for lone mothers from four to ten per cent. Poverty has increased for
both lone and couple-mothers, but from 1988-91 and up to 1995, lone mothers
were more likely to be poor than couple-mothers, their situation having
deteriorated after the late 1980s, both relatively and absolutely.
On the one hand, equivalent disposable income in the early 1990s
developed more unfavourably for couples, compared with lone parents, since
transfer payments cushioned the decrease in market income more for lone than
couple-families. However, the mid-1990s saw general cuts in the benefit system,
with rising costs for housing, childcare, health and social insurance. This
affects those who are net receivers of transfers, principally lone mothers,
even if they are still better protected by the benefits system.
On all indicators of economic security, the percentage of children
living with lone parents who experienced insecurity was roughly double that of
children with two parents in 1995. Various groups were analysed in a report
from the National Board of Welfare[liii]
on the situation of vulnerable groups in relation to having three or more
problems concerning housework, employment or earning a living. Among lone
mothers aged 25-64, 27 per cent had three or more problems compared with ten
per cent for the whole population. Among lone mothers aged 25-34, 36 per cent
had three or more problems, rising to 51 per cent when they lived in big
cities. Families generally had more economic problems. Overall, 28 per cent of
all children aged 0-15, compared with 17 per cent of the population as a whole,
lived in families which had difficulty in meeting expenses for food, housing
and other basic requirements during the year preceding the interview.[liv]
While there was some recovery by the end of the century, poverty rates
for lone mothers without work were still 34.2 per cent in 2000, and 5.6 per
cent for those working. For two-parent families, the rates were 13.7 per cent
where there was no worker, and 1.6 per cent where there were two—but a higher
rate of 8.2 per cent where there was one worker.[lv] This
testifies to both the precarious position of lone parents in the labour market,
and the lack of support for one-wage, two-parent families, compared with the
big subsidies going to lone working parents.
Declining employment
In 1979, Swedish lone mothers were more likely than couple-mothers to
be employed: 83.5 and 79.3 per cent respectively. In the mid-1980s, employment
was 85 per cent for both groups. Reversal happened in the 1990s. In 1994, the
participation of lone mothers in the labour market was 70 per cent and for
married and cohabiting women it was 79 per cent. Similarly in Britain, the
proportion of lone mothers who were employed declined to 42 per cent compared
with 65 per cent of couple-mothers in 1992-5. Long-term unemployment increased
for both lone and couple-mothers, but rates of unemployment increased among
lone mothers from 4.8 in 1979 to 11.9 in 1992-5. Lone mothers have a
three-times higher risk of unemployment than couple-mothers.[lvi]
The proportion economically inactive was also higher in lone than
couple-mothers; peaking in 1992-5 with 8.3 of lone mothers and 3.6 of
couple-mothers. Between 1990-95, the proportion of children living with two
gainfully employed parents, married or cohabiting, decreased from 84 to 67 per
cent. The proportion of children living with a lone mother who was employed
declined from 72 to 58 per cent between 1985 and 1995, and with a full-time
employed lone mother from 36 to 31 per cent.
Lone mothers are part of a trend whereby the proportion of people
finding themselves outside the labour market increased over the 1980s and
1990s, despite a shortage of manpower. The risk of unemployment falls with
rising education and lone mothers have poorer educational levels compared with
married mothers. However, even with the same educational attainment, the
‘risk’ of unemployment is double for lone mothers. Lone mothers may have a
weaker bargaining position in the labour market,[lvii] and face
more discrimination, even in Sweden. They consider themselves to have less
secure jobs than married mothers, and report less understanding attitudes
towards their parenting role if, for example, they have to stay at home with a
sick child. Sympathetic employment in the private sector is precarious, and the
limits to public sector employment have been reached.
An egalitarian wage structure and taxes, rather than the welfare
state’s negative effects on work, savings and investment via means-tested
benefits (as in the UK, Australia and New Zealand), undermine Swedish women’s
incentives to work more hours, or to upgrade and invest in skills. Scandinavian
public employment offers good pay and security, but imposes a growing tax
burden. With high rates of productivity growth the system can be sustained;
when productivity or private investment is sluggish, severe cost problems
emerge. Sweden in the mid-80s faced declining fiscal capacity combined with
rising pressures on public job creation and/or income maintenance. Wage
differentials have since grown, and adjustments to benefit entitlements have
aimed to reduce disincentives and high absenteeism. Replacement rates for
sickness, parental leave and unemployment benefits have been trimmed, and the
second tier pension system overhauled. Pension contribution years have been
extended and benefits are now more tightly related to contributions.
The fiction of self-sufficiency
Tendencies to decreasing workforce participation levels, decreasing
disposable income, and vulnerability to poverty as well as welfare dependency,
suggest that the position of lone parents is precarious in Sweden, as
elsewhere, and raise questions about the capacity of Swedish policies
concerning lone parents to make them self-supporting, if not affluent.
Making lone parents ‘self sufficient’, let alone economically equal to
couples, means that their incomes are maintained with immense subsidies from
the state. Couples are positive or net contributors to the public purse; lone
parents are massive recipients of transfers. Transfers ensure that the adjusted
income for lone mothers is approximately 85-87 per cent of the corresponding
income for intact two-parent families. If no income redistribution occurred it
would be 55 per cent, given the same labour market participation. All in all,
adjusted disposable income is higher than the factor income for lone mothers,
and substantially lower for intact families with children (who are making the
big transfer to lone mothers). By 1985, public transfers of different kinds
accounted for 40 per cent of the overall net income of lone mothers, compared
with eight per cent for families with two earners. Even so, transfers only
covered two-thirds of the gap between divorced mothers and intact families. By
1993, in more difficult times, lone-parent families received 55 per cent of
their gross income from the market, and 45 per cent as transfer payments. The
proportions for couples with children were 79 per cent and 21 per cent
respectively.
Dependence on transfers makes lone parents vulnerable to cuts in
programmes. The recession during the early 1990s resulted in frozen or reduced
levels of state benefits, and a stricter policy towards social welfare
assistance. As workers, lone parents are one of the first groups to be affected
by adverse macroeconomic developments, even if they have low levels of poverty
in Sweden compared with other countries. The decline in their fortunes was
detectable by the end of the 1980s as their position in the labour market
deteriorated, and they faced decreasing real wages and rising childcare costs,
as childcare institutions were forced to reduce staff and raise costs. This
has had a knock-on effect, since universal benefits, for sickness,
unemployment, etc., are based on labour market performance.
Growing welfare dependency
The proportion of households that are dependent on social assistance,
whether at any time or for long periods, has grown, particularly for lone
mothers.[lviii]
Over time, they are six times more likely to receive social welfare and twice
as likely to get unemployment benefits. In 1970, 25 per cent of lone mothers
received social assistance, and by 1995, this was more than every third lone
mother, compared to around five per cent of couple-mothers. As such, 70 per
cent of lone mothers received means-tested allowances or transfers of some
sort, like housing assistance, compared with 22 per cent of couple households.
While means testing in Sweden has been comparatively limited compared to the
UK, the proportion of lone mothers receiving a housing allowance was 81 per
cent in 1993, compared to 20 per cent of couples with children. High participation
in the housing benefit system means that a lone mother considering increasing
her labour supply faces reduced housing benefits, with composite marginal tax
rates reaching 90 per cent.
As elsewhere, lone mothers, along with immigrants, are far more likely
to be long-term welfare recipients. During the period 1983-1992, nearly 14 per
cent of lone mothers received social assistance for three out of ten years,
compared to just over five per cent of couple-mothers. The picture was worse
for lone fathers, at 19 per cent.[lix]
All in all:
...data... indicate that the ‘feminisation of poverty’ is now emerging
as a phenomenon in Sweden as it has in many other countries. Low-paid jobs are
a part of this picture, as is the increased precariousness of lone mothers’ attachment
to the labour market and discrimination against them—particularly when they
have small children.[lx]
The growth of welfare dependency is part of a pattern of growing
drop-out from the labour market and increasing housing segregation, where the
dream towns of the urban planners have become, as elsewhere, sinks of
disadvantage. The pattern was spreading in the 1980s, a time of high overall
employment and economic growth, and was decisively reinforced by the recession
of the early 1990s. Between 1988 and 1997, employment among young people aged
16-34 fell off by about 400,000; only a minority of this was due to educational
expansion. In ‘disadvantaged’ districts, or areas where low-income earners are
at least ten times as numerous as high-income earners, nearly one-third of all
households with children in 1990 were lone-parent families, compared with
one-tenth in areas of high income. In some districts, nearly half of the
children and young people were recipients of social allowance.
Given the persistence, and even growth, of problems, despite the
assumption that all family forms are equal, or made so by progressive policies:
‘The national discourse on lone mothers in Sweden could be interpreted as
moving from an emphasis on lone mothers as part of a lifestyle change, towards
lone mothers as a social problem. Lone mothers are increasingly portrayed as
one of the groups that have fared less well than others during the
restructuring of the economy in Sweden since the 1980s.’[lxi]
By the 1980s, claimants for social assistance also included a high
proportion of single, young and often childless people, a situation now
emerging in the UK. Sweden has one of the biggest unemployment gaps between the
majority population and non-European immigrants of all industrialised nations.
At seven per cent, the poverty rate among non-elderly households without
children was higher in Sweden than in the UK. The reasons lie in alcohol/drug
abuse, and mental or physical illness, plus refugees from outside the Nordic
area and assorted drop-outs who do not fulfil the criteria for mainstream
benefits and who cannot, or do not want to, work. Single men without children
make up about a third of Sweden’s welfare caseload.
There has been some reduction in welfare dependency since the late 1990s,
and in 2001 a target for ‘social justice’ was set substantially to reduce the
numbers whose income is lower than basic subsistence, halve the sick leave rate
by 2008, and cut dependence on social assistance by a half by 2004—an ambitious
programme involving a reduction on the level of 1990.[lxii]
Divorce is disadvantageous—even in Sweden
Divorce still disadvantages Swedish women. They earn less than men,
and, given economies of scale, the division of the household into two implies
than an increase in total income is necessary to maintain former living
standards. If there had been no welfare benefits or other programmes, the
income of divorced women would have been only two-thirds that of individuals in
intact families in 1990. After divorce, men contribute less to supporting their
children and former spouse.[lxiii]
The situation of Swedish women without
children is even worse after divorce than it is for mothers since they do not
qualify for the income transfers.
As much as lone parenthood is still disadvantageous in Sweden, so marriage remains advantageous. In all countries, from Japan to the USA, married couples see income and wealth grow over time, compared to lone adult fam