The First Part-TIME Economy in the World
Does it Work?
part-time jobs has risen by a staggering 20 percentage points, from 16.6 percent in 1979 to
36.5 percent in 1996. As we saw in Table 2 this is an absolute record in the OECD area.
This part-time revolution - if that word may be used - is related to the pressure for
collective working time reduction for two reasons. In the early 1981 employers began to
feature part-time employment as their alternative to union demands for a collective
reduction of working hours. This may have been ideological rather than practical, but soon
they were called to task by an increasing number of women who wanted to retain their jobs
on a part-time basis (see below). In later years, when due to the particular form of working
time reduction in the early 1980s, employers needed workers to fill the gap between
(shorter) working time and (longer) operating time needed to respond to increased demand,
part-time jobs began to play a role in the optimal staffing policies of employers. This
became more important role once unions agreed to working time flexibility in the 1990s.
These demand side explanations of the rise in part-time employment are probably
secondary. The decisive element in the Dutch part-time revolution is found in changes on
the supply side, i.e. the entry of (married) women into the labour market. However, the
predicted resistance of employers against part-time jobs (as fixed costs are inevitably
higher) was lowered to the collective labour time reduction policies of the unions and the
particular form in which the reduction was realised.
4 Atypical employment, part-TIME jobs and flexibility
Having described the main changes in the Dutch labour market, the role of wage
moderation, sectoral changes and job-sharing, I will now discuss the issues of atypical
employment and flexibility. In the previous section we saw that working-time schedules
have become more variable and individualised, but what about atypical employment
contracts. How many of the new jobs - part-time or full-time - are in fact ‘contingent’?
Flexibility can have different sources and take different forms. A useful distinction is
between internal and external flexibility (de Haan, Vos and de Jong 1994). Only in the
second case we speak of ‘contingent’ work in the sense of ‘a lack of attachment between the
worker and the employer (Freedman 1985; Polivka and Nardone 1989). The two best-
known forms of external flexibility are temp workers employed by temporary work agencies
and workers on temporary or fixed duration contracts of less than a year without the
prospect of a regular (‘open ended’) employment contract. Specific forms of flexible
employment are workers on call, temporary substitutes, and contracts with unspecified but
variable hours and earnings (‘zero-hours’ and ‘min-max’ contracts).
Further forms of external numerical flexibility involve ‘home work’, seasonal and vacation
jobs, some forms of self-employment and some types of ‘labour pools’. Internal flexibility
relates to increased variation in working hours and flexible working-time arrangements of
regular workers employed on standard contracts. Compared to external flexibility, worker
need be less uncertain about the continuation of employment and earnings, whereas the
employer need have less worries about quality of staff.
If the variability of labour input concerns the content of the job, we speak of functional
flexibility rather than numerical flexibility. In addition to multi-skilling, job rotation,
teamwork, and similar forms, Dutch firms now experiment with different forms of ‘job
pools’. These ‘job pools’ are to be distinguished from the traditional ‘labour pools’ based on
additional employment programs for the long-term unemployed or unemployed youths. Of
the latter there are various examples in the Netherlands - the total market for additional job
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