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The European Commission's 2015 Roadmap on work-life balance urges a comprehensive policy and regulatory approach as essential to addressing the interrelated goals of reconciling work and family, sharing of care work between women and men, and attaining substantive gender equality. However, the EU's key instrument setting 'normal' hours of work standards, the Working Time Directive, is absent amongst the measures identified as central to such a comprehensive approach. Attributing this omission in part to the Directive's historic evolution, its controversial and unsettled status, and its apparent gender 'neutrality', this article argues that work-life balance strategies must incorporate standard working-time considerations if they are to be effective; likewise, a more meaningful engagement with and the advancement of work-family reconciliation and equality goals is crucial for the Working Time Directive's continued relevance. Failing such a more obvious articulation between the two sets of policies, a number of goals currently on the EU agenda will be difficult to attain, as supporting caregivers and redistributing unpaid work between women and men, but also objectives of active aging and Europe's long-term social sustainability require the development of more sustainable work and working-time practices.

The standard approach to regulating working hours rests on gendered assumptions about how paid and unpaid work ought to be divided. In this book, Ania Zbyszewska takes a feminist, socio-legal approach to evaluate whether the contemporary European working time regimes can support a more equal sharing of this work. Focusing on the legal and political developments surrounding the EU's Working Time Directive and the reforms of Poland's Labour Code, Zbyszewska reveals that both regimes retain this traditional gender bias, and suggests the reasons for its persistence. She employs a wide range of data sources and uses the Polish case to assess the EU influence over national policy discourse and regulation, with the broader transnational policy trends also considered. This book combines legal analysis with social and political science concepts to highlight law's constitutive role and relational dimensions, and to reflect on the relationship between discursive politics and legal action.

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Age has become a crucial factor in labour market regulation measures adopted in Poland in recent years. Inspired by the Europe 2020 strategy of ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’, Poland’s own long-term development plans, especially those adopted by the former Civic Platform-led administration, place a significant emphasis on extended working lives as essential to economic sustainability. Due to low employment rates among Poland’s senior age cohorts, and the shortfall between the actual and statutory age of retirement, many of the country’s Active Aging measures have focused primarily on employment activation of workers over the age 50. The supply-side activation techniques and demand-side incentives, combined with pension system reforms, have been the key measures designed to encourage longer working lives. However, there is a need to consider the extent to which these measures are achievable and adequate. From a feminist, socio-legal perspective, this article critically evaluates Poland’s Active Aging policy and reforms by locating them at the intersection of the transformation and restructuring of the Polish welfare state and the re-regulation of the country’s labour market according to neoliberal values. Two key points of interest, or sources of tension, are identified: the extent to which efforts to bolster older people’s employment participation take adequate account of labour market conditions, and the roles that older people play in the provision of care and other activities involved in the maintenance of living standards. As the article shows, the potentially negative consequences of this policy trajectory for the well-being of older people in and out of the labour market, and for the organization of care and the broader processes of social reproduction, though potentially exacerbated by current policies, have tended to be downplayed in policy and legal reform.