The Impact of Europe's Call to Improve Work-Life Balance: A Comparative Analysis of Collective Bargaining in France and Luxembourg

The article explores the effectiveness of the call from European institutions to member states and social partners to work towards improving the work-life balance, particularly by engaging in social dialogue. It focuses particularly on the response from social partners in France and Luxembourg, two countries with very different gender conventions and systems of professional relations. The article begins by outlining the nature of the European call and how it was received by institutions in France and Luxembourg. It then conducts an exploratory analysis of the results of collective bargaining at branch and company level, drawing on comparable samples from the two countries. The article sets out to explore in what form and with what content the theme of work-life balance was bargained within the limited sample as a means of fully understanding its impact by relating the results to the range of institutional forms of support currently extant.