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This chapter introduces the measures of working conditions and labor rights that are the focus of the book and shows how labor conditions changed in the late 20th century. The key working conditions are pay, hours of work, and workplace health and safety. The four key labor rights (emphasized in policy discussions by international organizations) are freedom of association, nondiscrimination, abolition of forced labor, and reduction of child labor. Evidence presented in this chapter shows that measures of these working conditions and labor rights improved during the late 20th century, a period of increased international economic integration. The data also show that countries that are open to international trade have superior labor conditions.

This chapter focuses on older individuals' plans for retirement and the realization of those plans. Using HRS data, the widespread interest among workers approaching retirement age in cutting back on their hours or changing the type of work they do, as a transition to, or in lieu of, full retirement, is documented. The extent to which these individuals are able to realize their plans is then examined. It is shown that those who plan to stop working altogether generally do, while those who plan to reduce their hours or change the type of work they do most often do not realize these plans. The factors that influence whether and how older individuals realize plans to reduce their hours and remain employed are considered.

The length of the standard workweek has been a contentious topic in Germany over the past thirty years. In the 1980s and 1990s, trade unions reached agreements to reduce normal hours, in order to raise employment. This chapter begins with an overview of the institutional context and the development of normal hours worked in Germany. Section 5.3 provides a review of the econometric evidence for Germany on the impact of reductions in standard hours on employment and wages. Section 5.4 shows that reductions in standard hours were accompanied by various forms of flexible working-time arrangements. Section 5.5 describes some well-known examples of firms which have increased normal hours and simultaneously pronounced working hours, employment, wages job guarantees. Section 5.6 presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between changes in standard hours and employment (and labor productivity) growth. Section 5.7 presents some concluding remarks.

This chapter examines how transnational companies make use of what it calls time arbitrage—the exploitation of time discrepancies between geographical labor markets to make a profit. The extension of work hours through global outsourcing raises the possibility of a 24-hour work cycle. This means long hours for offshore Indian workers. The other option is the direct adoption of Western timings in offshore offices. This translates into permanent night shifts for workers as spatial and temporal disorientation are neatly combined. The chapter considers the impact of offshore workers' long, busy, and odd hours on family and friends as well as mental and physical health. It highlights the tension between the network time of corporate globalization and the prosaic rhythms of ordinary life. It shows that time arbitrage has resulted in long work hours, an intense work pace, and temporal displacement among Indian offshore workers.

Based on Gallup World Poll data collected in seven regions of the world, this chapter studies the relationship between hours worked, perceived job fit, and well-being. Workers who are in more satisfying jobs, where they have the opportunity to do what they do best (job fit), have higher life evaluation and better daily experiences/affect across all regions studied. This finding emerges after controlling for demographics and other subjective life domains. Job fit and hours worked interact such that the addition of hours worked results in increasing declines in positive daily experiences (enjoyment, feeling treated with respect, and choice) for people with low job fit. As daily hours worked increased from 5-10 across workers, daily experiences/affect did not deteriorate as rapidly for those reporting high job fit. Hours worked in a day did not significantly impact negative daily affect/experiences in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia. Job fit explained about 1.5 steps on the ladder of life (life evaluation), across the range of hours worked per week, whereas hours worked per week explained less than one-half step on the ladder of life.

This chapter describes a way to conceptualize and measure employment performance. It argues that to assess employment performance since the late 1970s, the most useful measure is employment change. This means change in the employment rate, not change in the number of people employed. It would be helpful to adjust this for work hours, but data limitations prevent that and the best available data suggest that doing so would not change the story much in any event. The chapter also outlines a strategy for analyzing the impact of equality-enhancing institutions and policies on employment performance.

This concluding chapter presents a synthesis of the discussions in the preceding chapters. It is argued that in no country that engaged in ‘straight’ work-sharing (i.e., decreasing the workweek from, say, forty to thirty-five hours) created extra employment. In all countries there were and still are forces pushing for some form of work-sharing. However, the exact implementation is an equilibrium phenomenon that largely depends on a complex set of factors ranging from institutions, the size and international positioning of the country (contrast Sweden, a small open country, and France, a much bigger country with ambiguous feelings vis-à-vis globalization); the centralization or decentralization of union-firm bargaining (compare Germany, with industry-level bargaining, versus France, with relatively weak unions); and family preferences (contrast the Netherlands, where a significant proportion of citizens prefer women to take care of children, versus Sweden, where men are virtually mandated to take parental leave).

This chapter discusses the significant and ongoing changes taking place in the way time is organized in large organizations. There is clear indication from management that working-time changes were critical to employment change and restructuring. However, many of these changes are far from sustainable, particularly given the need for skilled and committed workers. Managers were aware of the contradictions and conflicts within their own policies, but believed that they have few options other than adopting a policy of reducing costs and raising work intensity. Many workers expressed dismay over the kinds of change taking place and were contemplating other jobs.

This chapter examines workweek reductions experiments in France. Using the 1982 workweek reduction, it is shown that work-sharing policies, per se, do not work. Put differently, they are not apt to work as long as wage subsidies are not offered to the firms. Their impact of employment and production is then shown using the experience of the experiment conducted at the end of the 1990s. Payroll tax subsidies (as well as other types of subsidies) mitigated the negative effects on employment of this last experiment. In the short run, firms that went to thirty-five hours benefited from the policy, in particular low-productivity firms (because payroll tax subsidies were disproportionately directed to them) to the detriment of firms that stayed at thirty-nine hours. Hence, in the short run, employment was redirected to low-productivity firms adopting the policy. Then, in the medium run, the breath of air coming from the subsidies stopped working and the firms that had moved to thirty-five hours started to fail massively, while the survivors appear to have benefited from these deaths.

One of the barriers that has repeatedly derailed attempts to address the issue of work-hour restrictions is the long hours worked by resident physicians during training. It is very difficult for specialists in occupational health — who champion workplace safety issues ranging from hearing protection to exposure to chemical carcinogens — to argue that sixteen-hour work shifts are hazardous when physicians routinely care for patients working twenty-four-hour shifts. Though a consolidated episode of ten hours of sleep restores performance to baseline levels for a few hours, those with a history of chronic sleep loss deteriorate much more rapidly as the number of consecutive hours of wakefulness increases, particularly overnight. Once physician work-hour reform has been implemented successfully in the United States, it will serve as the foundation for implementation of safer work schedules in a wide variety of industries.

This chapter examines data describing the time that people spend in each of the many activities that make up their day. It focuses on data from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and from the early 2000s, for Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the USA. It considers patterns and changes in non-work activities that are classified into several major groups. It then raises questions such as: how do patterns of work activities differ over the week, and over the day, in the EU and USA? Would market work in the EU look the same as in the USA if Europeans had the same patterns of daily and weekly market activity as Americans?

This chapter examines the reasons behind the major gap in labour productivity between the US and Europe. In Europe, there are both relatively fewer people at work (a lower employment to population ratio) and fewer hours worked per worker than in the US. It is shown that Europeans work less than Americans mainly because there are institutions inducing or actually forcing them to do so. Thus, Europeans can be induced to work more or less by reforming these institutions. An overview of the two parts of this book is presented.

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 explores why employers might permit phased retirement only after employees officially retire. This issue is addressed based on interviews with close to 1,000 establishments regarding their phased retirement policies. Employers were asked whether they would permit an older worker to reduce hours, and, if so, whether they favoured reduction in hours before or after official retirement. Results show that many employers do not indicate a strong preference; rather, they seem open to informally arranged reductions in hours, both before and after official retirement. Statistical methods were used to analyze what types of employers might permit hour reductions to occur before and/or after official retirement. The findings suggest that the preference for retire/rehire is at the individual rather than the establishment level, often due to pension and other benefit plan inducements. Government policy could enhance work/retirement flexibility by clarifying the meaning of what constitutes retirement under tax and labour law.

During the recession of 2008–9, labor hours fell sharply, while wages and output per hour rose. Some, but not all, of the productivity and wage increase can be attributed to changing quality of the workforce. The rest of the increase appears to be due to increases in production inputs other than labor hours. All of these findings, plus the drop in consumer expenditure, are consistent with the hypothesis that labor market distortions were increasing during the recession and have remained in place during the slow recovery. Producers appear to be trying to continue production with less labor, rather than cutting labor hours as a means of cutting output.

Examines changes that have been taking place in the treatment of regular full-time workers in Japan. Among the developments examined are the introduction of performance-related pay, flattening of the age-earnings profile, specialist training, and shorter working hours. Looks at trends in labour mobility and concludes that long-term employment is still the rule for the majority of these employees.

This chapter investigates what the inquisitional archives reveal about 16th-century Spanish presses. Working practices and hours, accommodation, the roles of slaves, apprentices, learned correctores (editors-cum-prooofreaders), type-casters, ink-makers, binders, beaters, pullers, compositors, and women, as well as the composition of a typical team of specialists working cooperatively in the complex process of printing books are all investigated. The particular problems suffered by Spanish presses are outlined: the cumbersome bureaucracy involved in licencing books for printing, the cost of imported paper, competition from imports, and the lack of capital investment by consortia of publishers that led to the weakness of the Spanish printing industry, which catered largely for the domestic rather than the export market. The preponderance of foreigners, who frequently had only a poor command of Spanish, working as compositors explains the numerous errata to be found in Spanish editions.