Föräldrar i arbete. En könskritisk undersökning av småbarnsföräldrars arbetsrättsliga ställning (Parents at work. A gender-critical study on the position of parents of young children in labour law)

Sammanfattning: This dissertation deals with the position of working parents in labour legislation and the protection. The starting point for the thesis is that the rules in labour law concerning employees? parenthood, despite the fairly strongly formulated protection of their rights, in practice have a relatively weak normative position in working life and in labour law. The weakness of the rules on parenthood can be explained as a result of a normative conflict, or incoherence, affecting the judicial sphere, which means that deviating norms and values encroach on the rules about parenthood and weaken their position. The central aim of the dissertation is to elucidate and analyse this normative conflict, against the background of an account of the content of the relevant legal rules. To achieve this purpose requires specially studying the weakness of the rules on parenthood due to gender-related notions about employees and parents which exist in society, and which are also expressed in the law and the legal argumentation. Initially the dissertation surveys the content of the legal rules concerning employees? parenthood during the hundred years they have existed, cites the argumentation concerning these rules, and clarifies and discusses the changes in values reflected by this legislative development. The following chapter, chapter three, is devoted to gender-related notions about parents in everyday life. Chapter four examines how gender-related ideas about employees influence the formal and informal conditions that determine the ability to combine work with parenthood. Chapters five, six, and seven investigate the special rules of labour law, both EC law and Swedish law, which apply to employees who have parental responsibility or are about to have parental responsibility. The eighth and ninth chapters deal with rules related to parenthood in the large context of labour law to which they belong. This leads to a more complete analysis of the meaning of the rules on parenthood. In the tenth and last chapter there is a theoretical discussion of the central issues raised in the book. Here the basic questions posed by the dissertation are also linked to a forward-looking analysis based on recent developments in working life.