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This chapter explores contemporary regulatory responses to challenges to the temporal boundaries of the SER and their associated precariousness, typified by the 1994 ILO Convention on Part‐Time Work, which subscribes to equal treatment. To analyse the logic of this regulation, it considers the nature and significance of part‐time employment in Australia, where it is highly prevalent and also deeply gendered. However, it is the composition of part‐time employment that most distinguishes this national case: a relatively small proportion of part‐time workers are permanent employees. Rather, many part‐time workers are employed either on a casual or fixed‐term basis or are self‐employed. Even among all part‐time employees, most are casual—many of whom are women. The Australian case illustrates the implications of SER‐centric responses to precariousness amongst part‐time workers that chiefly address the situation of permanent part‐time wage‐earners, while leaving the situation of their casual counterparts intact.

Focuses on the growing use of atypical labour in non-standard forms of employment, especially part-time employment in Japan. Examines a number of different possible explanations for this ongoing trend and concludes that the major factors are cost-cutting by employers, demands for greater flexibility in working hours, and the decline of the family enterprise and self-employment.

This chapter gives an overview of how work-sharing was implemented in the Netherlands. It shows that its employment effects were limited. However, work-sharing in the early 1980s was responsible for an unprecedented level of part-time employment in the Netherlands. This chapter is organized as follows. First, it discusses how work-sharing was implemented in the Netherlands. It then discusses the employment effects of work-sharing, especially regardng part-time employment. The influence of public policy and social values on labour force participation is considered.

This chapter aims to understand why part-time work and gender interact with one another in the field experiment. The masculine nature of the ideal worker norm and the feminized nature of part-time employment are central to understanding the gender-differentiated ways that hiring professionals treat workers with histories of part-time employment. During initial screening, employers likely do not have information about why a worker was in a part-time position, leaving them with significant uncertainty. Given a job applicant's narrative is unlikely to be available at this moment of initial screening, one way that employers make sense of part-time employment is by drawing on the stereotypes and cultural beliefs about the gender of the worker to weave a narrative about the applicant's part-time experience. In this way, hiring professionals develop stratified stories.

This chapter examines professional women's motivations for part-time and flexible working beyond a ubiquitous balance-seeking goal. Three common motivations form shared intention narratives that express what women hope to achieve with their employment adjustment: resolving work–life conflict, protecting careers, and expanding careers. Close examination of how women explain their motivation for their particular working arrangement reveals the layers of meaning attached to it and the complexity of the practical and ideological settlement it reflects. This particular employment transition holds far greater significance in mothers' lives than a simple adjustment to the contract of employment. The chapter illustrates how mothers' working hours choices are morally potent, socially informed, and internally justified as the right way for them to do things at the time. An important finding is the pursuit of part-time and flexible working arrangements with the express intention to expand career opportunities.

This chapter begins by summarising the policy and legislation changes that impacted female employment outcomes. It focuses on the changes in the labour market outcomes between female and male workers through a range of employment and wage measures and the possible factors that contribute to the gap. The chapter further investigates how the recent recession affected female employment.

In the last decades of the millennium, women increasingly were included into the Western European labour markets; however, there were considerable differences in the development paths of European labour markets regarding the structures of labour market integration and labour market exclusion in terms of the development of labour force participation rates of women. The differences also concern the ways in which women were integrated into waged work. In most countries, it is only the part-time employment of women that has increased. This chapter discusses the changing labour markets and welfare states from the context of European gender arrangements. In this chapter, it is argued that the integration of women within the labour market is not a simple reaction to state policies. Rather, welfare state institutions are embedded in society and as a result, properties of welfare policies may be explained by central cultural values and ideals in society and the way these change, just as individuals refer to cultural values and ideals. As such, the behaviour of individuals is influenced by gender arrangements, which refer to complex mutual interrelationships between policies, cultural values and institutions. Different gender arrangements are associated with different ideals of gender inequality, of integration and of action. Discussions in this chapter include: concepts of citizenship and gender; cross-national analysis of gender policies of welfare states in the framework of gender arrangements; and analyses of changes in welfare state policies within European gender arrangements.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of labour earnings for income and income inequality –also among top incomes. With a focus on employees and Europe, the chapter elaborates on the relationship between the household income distribution and the individual earnings distribution. On the one hand, households flatten individual inequalities of earnings, by combining employees from different levels of the earnings distribution, and of employment, by bringing people together with diverging working hours – part-time employment appears to be surprisingly evenly spread over the household earnings distribution. On the other hand, the combination of earnings and hours within the household augments household inequality of earnings and employment. The chapter scrutinises the role of dual-earner and multiple-earner households, demonstrating its importance at the top of the distribution. Multiple earning is very important in countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the chapter speculates that it may be part of household formation aimed at reducing poverty.

This chapter examines the changing employment market in the UK and suggests that a Citizen's Basic Income is appropriate to any future scenario. It first considers the economic efficiency of a Citizen's Basic Income and how a Citizen's Basic Income would facilitate a more flexible employment market, resulting in a more efficient allocation of labour, and thus in a more efficient economy. It then discusses the effects of a Citizen's Basic Income on employment with respect to the so-called precarity trap, marginal deduction rates, part-time employment, choice in employment patterns, and education and training. It also explains why a Citizen's Basic Income is appropriate to any future employment market and concludes by outlining how, by disconnecting work and income, it would ascribe value to all kinds of work, thus creating a level playing field between paid employment, care work and voluntary activity in and for the community.