Mara Yerkes & Jelle Visser
1. Introduction
In this paper, we consider the phenomenal growth of part-time work and the emergence of the one-
and-a-half earner model in the Netherlands, comparing this to the growth and high levels of part-
time work evident in Germany and the United Kingdom. Despite cross-national differences in the
development of part-time work, many working mothers, in all three countries, seem to accept part-
time employment as a way to combine paid work and motherhood. In the Netherlands, part-time
work is more widely diffused than elsewhere, both among men and women. This diffusion goes
together with a pattern of “normalisation” of part-time work also in terms of employee rights and
entitlements, narrowing the differences between part-time and full-time work. Currently,
involuntary part-time work is low in the Netherlands, with only a minor gap between women’s
preferred and actual working time (Yerkes, 2003). Another indicator is that the incidence of part-
time work among Dutch men and women continued to rise in the 1990s, in spite of the large drop
in unemployment rates, from 5.7 percent in 1990 to 2.3 per cent in 2002 for men and from 10.9 per
cent to 2.9 for women in the same period (OECD, 2004). While the initial rise of part-time
employment in the Netherlands may have been shaped by the threat of unemployment, this is much
less plausible for the 1990s. Hence, we need to look at institutions and policies. While in a country
like Denmark, the welfare state, job growth in public services and labour market and tax regulations
initially produced high levels of part-time employment among women, there has been a subsequent
fall in the incidence of part-time work among women (Rasmussen, Lind and Visser, 2005). The
Dutch situation, even in the 1990s, reflects a different history of women’s work and motherhood, a
path dependent development that encouraged families, governments and social partners to see part-
time work and shorter working hours as a model for balancing work-family pressures. In any case,
social partners and government supported the diffusion and normalisation of part-time jobs towards
a standard of “decent work” in terms of choice, rights, earnings and equality (ILO, 2004). Yet, part-
time work remains a highly gendered phenomenon. In our comparison, we show that in Germany
and the UK, while sharing a highly gendered employment pattern and a strong “breadwinner”
welfare state tradition with the Netherlands, part-time work developed under different conditions
that make it more difficult to overcome “marginalisation”. Recently governments in both countries,
in response to European policies, particularly in the context of the European Employment Strategy,
started to address issues related to part-time work, employee rights and reconciling work-family
pressures.
Women’s working patterns are not a new topic in sociology. Despite this, women’s labour market
participation patterns continue to receive a great deal of attention from scholars and policy-makers
alike because many relevant questions regarding women’s work remain insufficiently answered.
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