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There are evident similarities in the way large‐scale grocery retailing has developed in Britain and France, and in the manpower planning problems confronting managers in the two countries. In France, however, significantly lower levels of part‐time work appear to be employed in this sector. This article investigates how different approaches to manpower utilisation in the two countries may relate to the way in which part‐time work has developed nationally. Specifically, it presents background data relating to the growth and utilisation of part‐time work both nationally and within food retailing. It then outlines some of the main results emerging from the author's PhD research into working patterns in this sphere. The article is edited from a paper recently presented to NEDO's Part‐time Employment Group.

Part‐time work is a ghetto for women, a blessing for employers. As a route back to work for women after a career break, it is associated with returning to lower‐status jobs and occupations than those held full‐time before the break. But it is at the forefront of changing ways of working: job‐sharing, job splitting, flexible working and revolving working weeks all pivot on what is fundamentally part‐time work. It is a model of work preferred by many, but at an unacceptable price, particularly for men. Is it possible to manage part‐time work better, to exploit its benefits without suffering its ill consequences? Jane Phillips investigates.

Women workers will find themselves at a disadvantage when competing in the labour market with men if they are not able to take advantage of promotion opportunities, regardless of whether they are full‐ or part‐timers. Women now make up 40 per cent of the UK labour force. However 46 per cent of employed women work part‐time compared with only 2 per cent of employed men. To a considerable extent this unequal position of women within the occupational structure is due to the particularly weak labour market position of married women who seek part‐time jobs. Married women are constrained by their family responsibilities in the type of work they take. Their situation contrasts sharply with men and women who enter the labour market straight from education with no domestic hindrances. Better occupational prospects for women workers will only be achieved if they have access to a wider range of occupations and are given the same opportunities for training and promotion as full‐timers.

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2008, this study examines how employment precarity is associated with the transition to first marriage. Building upon research on precarious work and economic determinants of marriage, I employ various measures of precarious work, including health insurance coverage, the provision of pension benefits, and part-time work. Results from the discrete-time hazard models show that precarious work delays men’s marriage entry more than women’s. For men, all indicators of precarious work decrease the odds of first marriage by up to 40%. Compared to men, women’s entry into first marriage is delayed when they have part-time employment. My study findings contribute to the theoretical discussions of the causes of family inequality, which have suggested the precarization of work and associated deterioration of job quality as one of the leading influences on the retreat from marriage. Further, results of this study indicate that the spread of precarious work has profound social consequences through its impact on family formation. In light of limited empirical research on the impact of precarious work on non-work-related outcomes, subsequent research needs to continue examining how employment precarity and family inequality are intertwined with various substantive foci across societies.

Part-time employment is a vital portion of the U.S. labor force, yet research to date has provided only limited insights into how to successfully create and manage this sector of the workforce. We propose that these limitations are due, at least in part, to an inadequate explication of the levels issues inherent in this area. In this article, we present a summary framework of constructs at the economic, industry, organization, individual, and work levels that influence part-time work arrangements. We then specify a cross-level moderator model that examines how the number of hours worked by employees influences their attitudes and behaviors. We posit that this relationship is moderated by a number of contextual effects at multiple levels. Using this sample model, we demonstrate the way in which researchers examining part-time work arrangements can effectively address levels issues. Our article concludes with a discussion of the implications that this summary framework has for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers.

Studies of the work “choices” of mothers are plentiful – from the factors that influence occupational selection to the reasons why women work or “opt out” when they have children. However, we know little about how subjective preference for full or part-time work is “aligned” or “misaligned” with mothers’ objective work status. Based on qualitative interviews from the MacArthur Network’s “Transition to Adulthood and Public Policy” study, we consider the “alignment” of objective work intensity (full vs. part time) and subjective preferences, finding that one-third of the working mothers in the sample are “misaligned.” At the same time, the majority preferred full-time work: two-thirds (66 percent) either wanted to work full time and did so, or wanted to work full time but were actually employed part time. One-third of the working mothers had a preference for part-time work (although some worked full time). Only 12 percent of the working mothers in the sample were able to work part time and desired this arrangement. Furthermore, regardless of the alignment of their objective work status and preference, the majority of these mothers emphasized self-fulfillment and intrinsic satisfaction though work.

This paper aims to identify the relative contribution of the business cycle and structural factors to the development of part-time employment in the 15 Member States of the European Union before the 2004 enlargement (EU-15) over the 1980s and 1990s. To do so, it exploits both cross-sectional and time series variations in available data over the past two decades.

Key results include the business cycle that is found to exert a short-term negative effect on part-time employment developments, although this effect fades away over the two-decade period considered. This finding is consistent with firms utilising part-time employment as a means of adjusting their labour force to economic conditions. Correspondingly, involuntary part-time employment is found to be counter-cyclical, being higher in troughs of economic activity. Splitting our sample reveals a very significant effect of the business cycle on the rate of part-time work for young and male prime-age workers. Conversely, the effect is very weak for women and insignificant for older workers.

Institutions and other structural factors are also found to be significant, longer run determinants of the rate of part-time employment. Changes in legislation affecting part-time employment are found to have a strong and positive impact on part-time employment developments. Moreover, employment protection legislation is positively correlated with the part-time employment rate (PTR), which is consistent with the use of part-time work as a tool for enhancing flexibility in the presence of rigid labour markets. Less robust evidence suggests the presence of unemployment traps for some potential part-time workers. Cross-country evidence also indicates that the lower labour costs borne by firms when employing part-time workers have a large and positive influence on the PTR. Overall, a contribution analysis shows that the main structural and institutional variables generally explain the development in the part-time rate in the EU countries fairly well, while this is obviously not the case in the United States.

This study investigates the relationship among preference for full-time employment, primacy of part-time employment, and work-related outcomes in a nationally representative sample of part-time college instructors. Results based on multilevel cross-classified random effects models indicate that part-time faculty who prefer full-time positions report working on average more hours per week and express greater work-related dissatisfaction than those who choose reduced work hours. Individuals whose part-time jobs are their primary jobs have less job satisfaction but work longer hours than those who treat part-time work as secondary. Finally, those who prefer full-time employment report more negative job satisfaction when the primacy of their part-time jobs is high.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate if, given personal, supply-related features, and labour demand-related variables, there is a difference in the share of women finding more stable jobs with respect to men, in an eight-year time span.

Fragmentation leads to a lower probability of transitioning into more certain, full-time work positions. The authors analyse a rich cohort of dependent workers in Emilia-Romagna to investigate whether part-time jobs lead to full-time jobs in a “stepping-stone” fashion and whether this happens with the same probability for men and women. The focus is on the cost of part-time jobs rather than the contrast between permanent and temporary jobs, as often observed in the literature. The authors also evaluate the transition between part-time job formulae and open-ended work arrangements to determine whether women's transition to full-fledged, stable work positions is slightly rarer than their male counterparts. Even if the authors allow for the fact that part-time contracts can be a choice and not an obligation, these contracts generate more flexibility in managing the equilibrium between private and work life and create more uncertainty than full-time contracts because of the fragmentation associated with these arrangements.

The authors find that women have a more fragmented working career than men, in that they hold more contracts than men in the same time span; moreover, the authors find that part-time jobs act more as bottlenecks for women than for men.

The authors use a large administrative dataset with over 600,000 workers observed in the 2008–2015 time span, in Emilia Romagna, Italy. The authors can disentangle the number of contracts per worker and observe individual, anonymise personal features, that the authors consider in the authors' propensity score estimate. The authors ran a robustness check of the PSM estimates through coarsened exact matching (CEM).

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of part-time work on absolute wages. The empirical focus is wages and working hours in three selected sectors within private services in the Danish labour market – industrial cleaning, retail, hotels and restaurants – and their agreement-based regulation of working time and wages. Theoretically, this analysis is inspired by the concept of living hours, which addresses the interaction between working hours and living wages, but adds a new layer to the concept in that the authors also consider the importance of working time regulations for securing a living wage.

The paper builds on desk research of collective agreements and analysis of monthly administrative register data on wages and working hours of Danish employees from the period 2008-2014.

This analysis shows that the de facto hourly wages have increased since the global financial crisis in all three sectors. This is in accordance with increasing minimum wage levels in the sector-level agreements. The majority of workers in all three sectors work part-time. Marginal part-timers – 15 hours or less per week – make up the largest group of workers. The de facto hourly wage for part-timers, including marginal part-timers, is relatively close to the sector average. However, the yearly job-related income is much lower for part-time than for full-time workers and much lower than the poverty threshold. Whereas the collective agreement in industrial cleaning includes a minimum floor of 15 weekly working hours – this is not the case in retail, hotels and restaurants. This creates a loophole in the latter two sectors that can be exploited by employers to gain wage flexibility through part-time work.

The living wage literature usually focusses on hourly wages (including minimum wages via collective agreements or legislation). This analysis demonstrates that studies of low-wage work must include the number of working hours and working time regulations, as this aspect can have a dramatic influence on absolute wages – even in cases of hourly wages at relatively high levels. Part-time work and especially marginal part-time work can be associated with very low yearly income levels – even in cases like Denmark – if regulations do not include minimum working time floors. The authors suggest that future studies include the perspective of living hours to draw attention to the effect of low number of weekly hours on absolute income levels.