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Informal caregiving, meaning taking health-related care of an older and/or disabled person in the personal network, often has consequences for paid work. Classically, scholars focus on two strategies of informal caregivers to adapt employment: stopping to work and reducing working hours. Two other plausible, but neglected, strategies may similarly have career consequences, namely changing jobs and becoming self-employed. First, we empirically assess whether experiencing a work-care conflict is a condition for choosing a work adaption strategy. Second, we theoretically and empirically take a life course (age at start of caregiving episode) and gender perspective on strategies to adapt paid work. We use detailed retrospective data on informal caregiving in the Netherlands (N = 3,673 caregiving episodes of 2,112 caregivers). Applying multilevel logistic regression analysis, we find that caregivers who felt that they had difficulties combining work and care, were more likely to choose any strategy. Especially caregivers who started to provide care at a young age (24 years or younger) were likely to reduce working hours or change jobs. When starting care in the early family formation stage (25–34 years), women were more likely to reduce working hours, whereas men were more likely to stop working in early middle age (45–54 years). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Work and family trajectories develop and interact over the life course in complex ways. Previous studies drew a fragmented picture of these trajectories and had limited scope. We provide the most comprehensive study of early-to-midlife work-family trajectories to date. Methods: Using retrospective data from waves 3 and 7 of the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we reconstructed work-family trajectories from age 15 to 49 among almost 80,000 individuals born between 1908 and 1967 across 28 countries. We appliedmultichannel sequence and cluster analysis to identify typical trajectories and multinomial logistic regression models to uncover their social composition. Results: The results revealed six common trajectories. The dominant and therefore standard trajectory represents continuous full-time employment with having a partner and children. Women, the lower educated and persons from conservative and liberal welfare regimes are underrepresented in this trajectory, whereasmen, higher educated people and those fromsocial-democratic, Eastern European and Baltic welfare regimes are overrepresented. The other trajectories denote a deviation from the standard one, integrating a non-standard form of work with standard family formation or vice versa. Mothers in a stable relationship generally work part-time or not at all. When mostly in full-time employment, women are more likely to be divorced. Lower educated persons are less likely to have work-family trajectories characterized by full-time work and a non-standard family, yetmore likely to be non-employed for large parts of their life with standard family formation. Younger cohorts are underrepresented in non-employment trajectories, but overrepresented in part-time employment trajectories along with a partner and children as well as full-time employment trajectories with divorce. Individuals from Southern European and liberal regimes are more likely to be non-working and self-employed partnered parents and those from social-democratic regimes are more likely to be full-time employed divorced parents. We also found pronounced gender differences in how educational level, birth cohort and welfare regime are associated with work-family trajectories from early to midlife. Discussion: Our findings highlight the socially stratified nature of earlier-life work-family trajectories in Europe. Potential implications for inequalities in later life are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the backdrop of aging populations and policies to extend working lives, this study advances prior research by examining how job satisfaction of older workers is associated with not only own, but also coworkers' usage of 3 human resource (HR) policies: phasing out (i.e. lighter workload, additional leave, and semi-retirement), demotion, and training. Exploiting unique, linked organization-department-employee data from the European Sustainable Workforce Survey (ESWS), hypotheses derived from the job demands-resources (JD-R) model and relative deprivation theory are tested with 3-level regression analysis. The findings show that demotees are less satisfied with their job compared to older employees who were not demoted, whereas participation in phasing out arrangements is not related to older workers' job satisfaction. Older employees who received training are more satisfied with their job than those who did not. Moreover, in departments where coworkers participated in training, older employees who did not receive training are more satisfied than those in departments where training is unavailable or in which training is offered, but not used. Phasing out and demotion of colleagues are not associated with job satisfaction of older workers. These results are largely in line with the JD-R model, as demotion would decrease motivation and, in turn, job satisfaction, whereas training would increase job resources and motivation and, in turn, job satisfaction. This study concludes that providing training to older workers is a fruitful HR strategy for employers to stimulate job satisfaction among their older employees and facilitate longer working lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study integrates a life course and social stratification perspective to examine early retirement in the Netherlands. Event history analysis of retrospective life course data from four rounds of the Family Survey Dutch Population reveals that employment career characteristics are strongly associated with early retirement. The results also show that educational differences in early labour force withdrawal persist when controlling for work history: lower-educated older men are more likely to exit employment before the age of 65 years, irrespective of their employment trajectories. Furthermore, working-class elderly face higher risks of disability and unemployment than members of the service class and the self-employed, because their occupational careers are more volatile and because they often work in the industrial sector for a long period of their lives. Against the background of ageing populations and policy measures to stimulate employment of older people, these findings suggest that social inequalities in old age could grow, as particularly less-educated and low-skilled older workers may not be able to prolong their employment career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]