Aliki Mouriki
6.3.1. Prevailing labour market characteristics
Employment structure
As stated earlier, the male breadwinner model is still resisting in Greece and Spain, despite the
steady growth of female employment rates, albeit from very low levels until the late 1990s. As low
average wages in these countries 51 cannot guarantee a family wage, women tend to seek full time
employment, in order to ensure a better income. Thus the incidence of part-time work in these two
countries is much lower than the EU average.52 However, Spain has the largest share of workers
employed on fixed-term contracts in the EU-27 (34%), whilst Greece can “boost” of its impressive
number of undeclared workers (estimated at around 20% of the workforce). Precarious forms of
employment are also growing rapidly. In Greece, in the period 2003-2006, pseudo-independent con-
tract work, also known as “bogus self-employment” increased by 77%, and interim work by 27% in
only one year, whilst around 70% of the total increase in employment is attributed to flexible work-
ing patterns (Labour Inspectorate Annual Report, 2007). Self-employment is also very widespread in
Greece, accounting for 40.7 % of total employment, as compared to the EU-27 average of 16.6 %
(Employment in Europe 2008).
The Netherlands, often admired for its ‘employment miracle’, owes its impressive track record
of job creation (four times larger than the EU average) mostly to the rapid expansion of part-time
employment over the past 30 years, a development that ranks it in the first place amongst all EU-27
countries and justifies its name as ‘the first part-time economy in the world’ (Visser, 2002). According
to Tijdens (2005), 3 factors have played a major role in this spectacular growth in part-time employ-
ment:
a) the employees have the right to adjust working hours to their needs: since 2000, workers in
firms with 10 or more employees have the right to adjust their working hours by 20%;
b) this adjustment can take place within one’s job, so there is no need to seek for another job;
c) the marginalisation of part-time work has been avoided by removing all discriminatory
clauses on working hours53
51 Average annual wages in Greece and Spain were only 25 934 USD and 27 735 USD respectively in 2006, whilst in the
Netherlands the average wage was 45 337 USD and in Denmark 56 598 USD, more than double than in the former
countries (OECD Employment Outlook, 2008).
52 The remuneration of part-time jobs in Greece is even lower than the unemployment benefit which currently stands
at € 430,75 per month.
53 An illustration of this non-marginalisation is the fact that 2 out of 5 women working part-time are in managerial,
professional or technical work (Visser, 2002).
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