The First Part-TIME Economy in the World
Does it Work?
Table 2 confirms the claim of the Netherlands as the first part-time economy in the world.
Part-time employment ratio’s for women show that the Netherlands has overtaken the
leading positions of the Scandinavian countries. At the same time, it becomes clear that in
terms of full-time employment of women very little has changed. The full-time employment
ratio of women has hardly changed in all these years and still is the lowest of all the
countries shown in Table 2. Hence, if one measures the total input of paid labour by women
in terms of full-time equivalents (counting part-time jobs as half-time jobs), we do observe
that the Netherlands remains at the bottom end of the table, preceding only Spain and Italy.
Returning our attention to Table 1, we observe that sectional employment trends in the
Netherlands went in almost opposite directions before and after 1984. In the 1970s the
subsidised sector (health, education) and government employment witnessed the strongest
growth, whereas private sector employment stagnated. Employment levels in industry fell
steeply and employment growth in private services (trade and transport, financial and
personal services, hotels and restaurants) was faint. After 1984 the picture is different. Job
decline in industry and agriculture has stopped. Employment growth is strongest in private
services, three per cent per year or four times as much as in the public and subsidised sector.
(The public sector absorbs only thirteen per cent of total employment, which is very low in
comparison with most European countries. The reason is that in the Netherlands many
‘public’ services, especially in health and social welfare, are organised by ‘voluntary
associations’ with support from public subsidies. Together with these semi-public activities,
the total ‘quartiary’ sector of public and subsidised services accounts for 25 per cent of total
employment).
Further contrasts between the two periods under consideration concern wage and equality
trends. There was real wage growth but much smaller than in the preceding decades. After
1979 real wage growth came to a standstill and in the early 1980s there was even a small
decline. Beginning with the Wassenaar agreement between the central organisations of trade
unions and employers at the end of 1982, trade unions have made wage restraint into their
official policy. This policy was continued, with a brief interruption around 1990, until today
- partly made possible by a reduction of taxes in support of the purchasing power of
workers (Visser 1998). As more households have two (or rather one-and-the-half) earners,
household incomes and domestic consumption has continuously risen in real terms, but
income differences between households (of different composition, with and without two
earners) as well as between individuals (both with employment, and between those with and
without employment) have increased. Indeed the post-war trend towards greater earnings
equality came to a halt in the early 1980s and was reversed. From the early 1980s on
earnings have grown more unequal, a trend which is found in most developed industrial
countries and not particularly pronounced in the Netherlands, unlike for instance the UK or
the US (OECD 1994; OECD 1998). The number of low paid jobs has increased partly as the
result of deliberate policies to create more employment opportunities for low-skilled
workers with little job experience (partly through additional job programmes, with subsidies
to employers). Finally, unemployment has fallen from its very high levels in the mid-1980s.
The standardised unemployment rate - based on ILO criteria - dropped to 5.5 per cent in
1997 and 4 per cent in 1998, which is the lowest rate in twenty years and less than half the
EU average.