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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.

This chapter initiates the book's statistical portrait of employment trends in industrialized contexts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This portrait illustrates the slow erosion of full‐time permanent employment in Australia, Canada, the European Union 15, and to a lesser extent the United States. Linking employment trends to sex/gender divisions of unpaid work, it also reveals that, despite formal equality, full‐time permanent employment and non‐standard employment remain gendered and shaped by immigration status to the present. Concern about the spread of precarious employment accompanied these trends. At the international level, the result was a series of regulations aimed at shoring up this employment norm: adopted between 1990 and 2008 and organized around its central pillars of working time, continuity, and the employment relationship, these regulations seek to ensure that citizen‐workers do not see their employment and occupational opportunities or working conditions limited by barriers based on form of employment.

This chapter traces the evolution of the SER as the baseline of international labour regulation in the interwar and post‐World War II periods. It reviews the SER's central pillars—the bilateral employment relationship, standardized working time, and continuous employment—and analyses their construction in ILO regulations. This discussion highlights the significance of exclusions in the creation of this employment norm. It also shows how even as the SER materialized for many working‐class men, the gender contract with which it was intertwined began to deteriorate. Regulations adopted in response to this crumbling gender contract starting in the 1950s sought to strip the SER of its formal exclusions. With the notable exception of those based on nationality, formal equality was the objective of interventions, but, by neglecting processes of social reproduction, ILO regulations retained an employment norm geared to male citizens as a baseline.

This chapter examines the theoretical underpinnings of the effects of work-sharing on employment. The analysis proceeds as follows: Section 4.2 is devoted to an analysis of labour demand when the firm chooses the number of jobs and hours. The interactions between employers' choice and workers' choice over hours, employment, and wages are studied in Section 4.3. Finally Section 4.4 provides some concluding comments. It is shown that compulsory reductions in standard hours can increase employment only in very special circumstances that are very rarely met in the real world. Cross-country differences in working time can be related to differences in institutions and cultures. Although imperfect competition may imply that state regulation of hours is required, this does not mean that systematic reductions in standard hours can improve employment or welfare.

This chapter considers the area of personal work relations, i.e., relations between employers and workers which are not mediated through the formal institutions of workers' collective representation. It argues that the main trend during the period under review was one of ‘de-standardization’ of those relations, initially through a straightforward process of de-regulation and later, under ‘New Labour’, through more sophisticated legal and regulatory mechanisms. The main aim of this policy, it is argued, was to promote managerial adaptability, i.e., the ability of employers to respond to changes in demand or methods of production. However, de-standardization was compatible with, and perhaps even required, some cautious conferment of new rights on workers, for example, in the area of ‘family-friendly’ policies. On the other hand, this policy caused difficulties for the government in relation to more far-reaching European proposals for individual rights, whether stemming from the European Court of Human Rights or the institutions of the European Community.

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 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 the impact of unions and working-time reductions in Sweden. It is shown that strong unions do not necessarily mean short weekly working hours and, specifically, strong unions do not always demand working-time reductions in order to preserve employment. Explicit working-time reductions are not the only policies that reduce actual hours worked. Policies that promote absence or career interruptions have the same motivations as working-time reductions and induce substantial reductions in actual hours worked in these countries. Recent policy experiments using career interruptions as work-sharing policies had negative effects on participants' subsequent wages and are not likely to have contributed to the employability of the long-term unemployed, in contrast to the initial intention.

This chapter considers the various interventions of the political institutions in the labour law field both in their own right, and in the context of the approach of the Court (analysed in detail in Chapter 4). Harmonization, minimum standard-setting, and the open method of coordination (OMC) are discussed with reference to their capacity to achieve the integrationist, economic, and social objectives of the European Union, and to the constraints imposed by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. The Working Time Directive and Lisbon Strategy are subjected to close scrutiny.

This chapter outlines the rationale for exploring change in employment policy using the three-ring framework of analysis. It focuses on three aspects of employment where organizations play a crucial role: staffing policies and practices, training and skill development, and working time.

The 1993 European Working Time Directive (EWTD) is intended to protect employees' health and safety and improve patient safety by limiting the maximum required working hours to forty-eight per week, averaged over up to six months; it was adopted into UK law through the Working Time Regulations 1998. The British government negotiated an extension of up to twelve years before full implementation in the UK was required, and changes affecting the medical profession have been phased in over a five year period, starting in August 2004, when junior doctors' six-monthly average weekly working hours were reduced from seventy-two to fifty-four hours per week. This chapter discusses the implications of the directive along with data from a study designed to test the feasibility and safety implications of a EWTD compliant rota. It addresses concerns regarding continuity of patient care and reduced educational opportunities along with the need for evidence-based policy and decision making.

Fagan and Walthery use Sen’s (1999) capabilities framework to advance the debate about choice and constraint in relation to part-time work. They use a European establishment survey to identify which employers permit their employees to make individual-level adjustments between full-time and part-time working, given that employer policy is an important social conversion factor which shapes individual working-time capabilities. State policy clearly matters, but across Europe firm-level characteristics, including sector, establishment size, presence of a trade union, and the gender and skill composition of the workforce, all had a significant and independent influence on employer policy towards individual-level working-time adjustments. The firm’s broader working-time practices and managerial culture towards their employees’ worklife balance had an additional and independent effect. Reversibility options were curtailed in establishments where the workforce was contracting, except in firms which had a policy of full reversibility targeted at skilled employees only.

The family-friendly organization of working time—as an issue for government policy—provides an interesting platform to analyse the way governments deal with the challenge of accommodating conflicting interests while pursuing their own policy goals. Whereas financial transfers and services to support work-family reconciliation can be directly provided through the welfare state system, employee-oriented time flexibility is subject to negotiation between employers and employees and therefore largely beyond direct government control. Focusing on policy choices by New Labour (1997–2005) in the United Kingdom and the Red-Green Coalition Government (1998–2005) in Germany, this chapter explores how the British and German governments addressed the challenge of steering change from a distance through a policy mix of encouragement of good practice and statutory regulation. Differences in policy choices are explained by situating them within nationally specific policy preferences, overarching policy goals, government-stakeholder relations, and past policy choices.

The chapter compares employment structures in five Continental European welfare states, with a focus on private services. Despite a common trend to overcome institutional employment barriers by creating a more divided labor market, a closer look reveals considerable differences between national patterns of standard and non-standard work. We identify five transformative pathways towards a more flexible and cheaper use of labor in Continental European welfare states: 1. defection from permanent contracts, 2. from full-time employment, 3. from dependent employment, 4. growing wage dispersion, and 5. government-sponsored labor cost reductions. The chapter shows that by relying on one or several of these options, each country developed a distinct solution for the labor cost problem in the service sector, which corresponds to a particular form of dualization.

This chapter argues that balance is the seductive and coercive mantra of modern motherhood that draws professional women towards flexible working practices. It is seductive because work forms part of a women's sense of self and few want to give up. It is coercive because mothers feel obliged to comply and make balance the quest of their lives. For many professional women who become mothers, achieving balance has become a career aim in itself. What this study has learned is that balance across work and family life cannot be achieved arithmetically by dividing time evenly across two domains because balance is subjective and cannot be measured in working hours. Almost as soon as equilibrium is sensed things change again, and in that way balance is also a dynamic construct; what it means tomorrow will be different from today.

This chapter confronts the agency capabilities gap from two perspectives (1) Comparing policies aimed at promoting worklife balance, their implementation and outcomes, with gendered norms regarding work and care. The chapter uses county level data and survey data across eleven European countries and Japan. The chapter uses county level data and survey data across eleven European countries and Japan. (2) the chapter examines the agency gap in attitudes regarding worklife balance priorities and working time capabilities (Lee and McCann 2006), which is operationalized as the differences between actual work hours in paid work and how many hours one would choose to work if it meant a loss or gain in pay.This analysis shows a complex relationship between work aspiration and practices which can be linked to national differences in worklife balance policies and gender norms.

This chapter examines the value of longitudinal data and longitudinal approaches for examining women's lives. In particular, the chapter focuses on the role of part-time work in the context of British women's work histories. In addition to presenting the outcome of longitudinal analyses of women's work histories, the chapter also places emphasis on the need to take a more reflexive approach to the use of qualitative life history data. It focuses on the manner in which longitudinal research on women's life has concentrated on the behaviour of mothers after the birth of their first child. In addition, the chapter also focuses on the implications of conflating all women with the subgroup of mothers for reifying the concept of gender from the perspective of feminist theory. The first section of this chapter concentrates on conceptualising women's employment. The first part discusses recent research on women's behaviour and highlights the importance of understanding the role of part-time employment in the dynamic context of women's work histories. The second part outlines some theoretical debates on the concept of ‘women’ within feminist writings. The second section of the chapter discusses the results of event history models, based on the data from the National Child Development Survey (NCDS). The final section considers how the recent feminist theory informs the manner of conducting and presenting longitudinal analyses.

This chapter describes changes aimed at improving the working lives of doctors. The British Medical Association (BMA) negotiated a ‘New Deal’, which established a contractual limit for doctors-in-training of fifty-six hours worked per week from August 2003. The European Working Time Directive (EWTD) was created by the Council of the European Union in 1993, which defines minimum requirements in relation to working hours, rest periods, annual leave, and working arrangements for night workers. Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) was a major reform of postgraduate medical training, devised to improve the quality of patient care through better education and training for doctors.

This chapter investigates the implications of the economic crisis on the peripheral workforce with a particular interest on the extent to which non-standard workers are involuntarily employed in these positions. It also reveals whether peripheral workers have been disproportionately exposed to employment insecurity. It shows that there has been an increase in the share of atypical employees, as well an increased exposure to involuntary atypical work between 2008 and 2010 in most countries. While atypical workers were more exposed to fear of job loss, there was no increase in this risk since recession. However, many of them regarded their jobs as having few opportunities for advancement. Atypical workers were also more likely to experience pay cuts and financial hardship compared to standard employees.

The introduction chapter outline the conceptual framework for the volume and describe the current patterns of part-time work. Part-time work has been a much visited research topic and the typical part-time worker still is a woman with children. Although gender and work-life balance continue to be at the heart of this topic, part-time work is increasingly connected to the political and academic debates about labour market outsiders. The ambition of this volume is to provide an up-to-date account of what kind of labour market phenomenon part-time work is to different categories of workers across Europe, the USA, Australia and South Korea and to explore how part-time is linked to precarious work and labour market dualisation. We discuss how the politics, regulations and institutions at different levels (supranational, national and workplace) have the capacity to influence part-time work. Based on the contributions to this book we present a typology of part-time work which moves beyond the traditional insider/outsider divide and provides a more diverse vocabulary for later analysis of part-time work.