The strong growth of atypical employment over the last decades in many OECD countries has sparked increasing research on the topic. Most research so far has treated part-time work as just one of many forms of precarious work and mainly focused on an increasing divide between labour market outsiders and full-time employed labour market insiders. This edited volume was designed to challenge such a simple and neat insider-outsider distinction and explores to what extent dualisation also occurs within the broad category of part-time work.
Part-time work can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be in the interest of employees and a measure of work-family reconciliation, allowing them to successfully balance work and care duties. On the other hand, part-time work can also be in the interest of employers and serve as a precarious, low-wage form of employment, allowing employers greater power and a more flexible workforce. The downstream consequences of part-time work are well documented throughout the edited volume: pay penalties, economic insecurity, and lower social protection, amongst others. Moreover, part-time work is not only highly gendered, but also immigrants, young people, and the low-skilled are more strongly affected by this labour market phenomenon.
The volume is organised around three overarching themes. The first part focuses on institutional and organisational regulations of part-time work. It explores how the EU legal framework deals with part-time work, how labour market flexibilisation in Italy and Spain contributed to highly precarious employment among women, the young, and workers of foreign origin, and how well-intended labour law amendments in the Norwegian health sector put additional strain on low-skilled workers with little power resources. The second part looks at the consequences of part-time work. It studies the relationship between part-time work and access to flexible working arrangements in 30 European countries, which social groups are affected by marginal part-time work in Denmark and the US, whether part-time work provides a stepping stone to full-time employment in Norway, and if bad part-time work has increased over the last decade in Norway and Finland. The third part studies the link between part-time work, work-life balance and gender. It investigates how the strong growth of mainly female Minijobs in Germany contributes to gender inequality, how gender-unequal part-time work patterns exist in both well protected (Netherlands) and low protected (Australia) labour markets, and how government attempts to increase female labour force participation in South Korea have resulted in less protected, low-wage part-time employment of women.
Overall, the edited volume addresses an important and timely topic from different angles. It impresses with a wide variety of diverse methodological approaches (for example, cross-country quantitative comparisons, detailed country case studies, qualitative interviews with affected part-time workers, intersectional analysis) and a broad set of countries under investigation. However, it comes at the cost that the single chapters are not highly integrated and do not clearly speak to each other. The introductory chapter introduces an innovative, two-dimensional typology of part-time work based on the voluntariness of part-time work and the quality of working conditions and social protection. Whereas the former is a simple binary distinction, the latter is divided into good, mixed, and bad. The editors make a compelling argument about the difficulty of drawing a sharp line between good and bad part-time work and, thus, the need to study this third group of mixed, semi-secure part-time workers. However, the editors remain vague about how we can theoretically and empirically distinguish this group from good and bad part-time employment. A potential avenue could have been the distinction between status – and risk-based conceptualisations of labour market dualization. Unfortunately, most of the following chapters do not rely on or use the typology, making the empirical usefulness of the typology uncertain. While it is interesting that part-time work is conceptualised and operationalised differently in the chapters, it also makes it challenging to combine and assess the various contributions and arrive at a clear conclusion. A more cohesive introduction and conclusion, which goes beyond summarising the main findings of the chapters, would have clarified the overall contribution.
Despite these shortcomings, the edited volume makes a strong case to study the complex nature and gendered consequences of part-time work and should be of great interest to labour market researchers and policymakers alike. It does not only point out the importance, and current lack, of fine-grained data to better assess different types of part-time employment and its consequences, it also raises various relevant questions for future research. First, how can countries promote part-time employment to successfully balance work and care duties without resorting to a precarious, gendered low-wage workforce? Second, there is still little research on the actual politics of part-time work and the positions of different political actors (parties, unions, employers, international organisations). For example, which political actors and coalitions can form a progressive alliance to push for cohesive protection of part-time work and improve work-family reconciliation policies? Third, how does the structural change towards automation, digitalisation and the spread of platform work affect the future of part-time employment? This edited volume is an important step towards addressing some of these questions and provides a nuanced analysis of labour market dualisation and part-time work. As such, it can be recommended to anyone wishing to expand their knowledge and understanding of labour market inequalities in the 21st century.
