The major premises on which western welfare systems have been based are inter-generational balance, stable and unified family, secure employment and a limited degree of conflict between family and professional life. To a degree, the contract has been implicit and depended on the traditional role of women and men in providing the division of labour between home and family, on the one hand, and work on the other. This aspect can be called the gender contract. The other principal aspect of the social contract – the employment contract – explicitly improved job security, wages and conditions for paid workers and social welfare and other state benefits in return for income taxes, bound together in an hierarchical relationship between the state, business and labour and serving a mass production system. The bases of this form of social contract are changing. Institutions are being forced to adjust to cope with the service economy, flexible and feminized production systems, the global perspective and the rise in overall uncertainty.
The global economy is undergoing a fundamental transformation in the nature of work brought on by the new technologies of the information and biotechnology revolutions. In the new era, the traditional political spectrum of marketplace vs government is likely to be replaced by the notion of a three-legged political stool with the marketplace, government and civil sectors each acting as a check and balance against the other in a new kind of tripartite politics.
Increasing participation of women in employment has not led to a redefinition of the social contract.