6 Working-time flexibility: diversification and fragmented time systems Working-time flexibility: diversification and the rise of fragmented time systems Iain Campbell Despite a lack of consensus concerning its meaning and measurement, labour market flexibility has been central to employment research and policy for at least three decades. Much of the impetus for its persistence comes from the stubborn push by neoliberal policy-makers, under the banner of flexibility, for deeper market liberalisation and the elimination of labour market rigidities. Even after
This book presents new theories and international empirical evidence on the state of work and employment around the world. Changes in production systems, economic conditions and regulatory conditions are posing new questions about the growing use by employers of precarious forms of work, the contradictory approaches of governments towards employment and social policy, and the ability of trade unions to improve the distribution of decent employment conditions. Designed as a tribute to the highly influential contributions of Jill Rubery, the book proposes a ‘new labour market segmentation approach’ for the investigation of issues of job quality, employment inequalities, and precarious work. This approach is distinctive in seeking to place the changing international patterns and experiences of labour market inequalities in the wider context of shifting gender relations, regulatory regimes and production structures.
work across the life course and we focus on parental leave and childcare as indicative of the care regime. The chapter draws on the theoretical framework developed by Rubery and colleagues (1999, 2001) and Rubery (2002). This theoretical tradition emphasises that the gender division of labour between employment and unpaid care and domestic work is structured by the articulation of family policies and the organisation of employment and working time, as well as other elements of the welfare state regime such as the taxation system. This approach has drawn attention to
insider, high-cost, high-skill manufacturing man, and outsider, low-cost, semi-skilled ‘servicing’ woman will be further intensified. Working time and ‘non-standard’ employment In a neo-liberal reading of flexibilised working time the emphasis is placed on the room for manoeuvre that an employer has to adjust working time within the firm, and to access a pool of contingent labour to stretch the temporal possibilities. For governmental programmes of restructuring this implies that the best practice is the deregulation of working time and employment Amoore_Global_05_Ch4
functions (Anderson, 2000). Inside the claim that competitiveness can be achieved via rapid response and adaptive functions, there are tensions and questions that will continue to resurface in the restructuring debate. Working time and ‘non-standard’ employment The debate surrounding the reorganisation of working time reveals a great deal about the negotiated and contested nature of social change in the sphere of work. For many commentators, the ‘speeding’ up of social change and the temporal rhythms of everyday life have transformed working practices beyond all
not able to exercise much choice or control over those hours (Bassanini and Caroli, 2014; Kivimaki et al., 2015; Lee and Lee, 2016). Indeed, the European Directive on Working Time (which places regulatory limits on working more than 48 hours per week) derives in part from the principle that excessive work hours are a public health issue. There is also evidence that more intensive work is associated with lower work-related well-being (Green, 2008; Green et al., 2016). Yet the supposed linkage between deteriorating health and greater work effort is based on a prior
SMIC was raised, the share of collective agreements with pay rates below the minimum wage had risen to 49 per cent. This triggered a pay bargaining round in which most rates were again raised above the SMIC (DARES, 2012: 351). Thus, as a result of the increases in the lowest collectively agreed rates, the entire wage grids, with their percentage differences between the individual pay grades, are shifted upwards. Since 2013 it has been possible, in the event of competitiveness problems, to negotiate changes to wages and working time at establishment level, although
services and family-oriented working-time arrangements for men and women support women’s economic activity after motherhood and provide a buffer against employer strategies of core–periphery segmentation (Anxo et al., 2007; 2010; Pettit and Hook, 2009; see also the section ‘Households, welfare regimes and inequalities effects’). In many developing countries, women’s relationship to paid work A new labour market segmentation approach 9 needs to be understood in terms of the relative stability of family and community systems (Abu Sharkh and Gough, 2010) leading to
by the massive use of discontinuous fixed-term contracts in the sector. However, such contracts are also a clear control mechanism, since employers can reward appropriate worker behaviour with a succession of temporary contracts. The extension of part-time employment is also due in large part to this time management logic in all those activities where activity peaks predominate on certain days or hours, as is the case in retail, hospitality, leisure activities and care services for the elderly, among others (Recio et al., 2015). The minimisation of working time has
teleworking, but makes no reference to homeworkers or domestic care workers, whose working time flexibility is more immediate and uncertain.6 A focus on the tensions between hyperflexibility strategies and everyday social practices reveals that general deregulation and new forms of work organisation replace one identified problem of poverty (unemployment) with other, less directly visible forms such as income inequality, insecurity, financial exclusion and indebtedness (International Labour Organisations (ILO), 1995). Indeed, implicit within OECD figures there is a