Part-time work is carried out for many different reasons, reflecting the interest of
workers, employers, or both. When looking at the advantages and disadvantages of
part-time work, it is important to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary part-
time, taking into account the ‘hidden’ involuntary part-timers trapped in this form of
work due to lack of other options. Research shows that part-time work has a series of
different consequences for employees, employers and the economy as a whole. For
example, part-time work is understood to increase female participation in the labour
force, and therefore has a positive effect on the employment rate. It allows employers
to adjust their resources to cyclical conditions over the course of a
day/week/month/year and it also allows businesses to respond to the economic cycle.
For employees it may be a solution to maintaining their work–life balance, enabling
parents to spend more time with their children while remaining in employment.
At the same time, part-time work may increase overall labour costs for businesses
due to the presence of fixed costs. Employees working part-time have lower earnings
and fewer possibilities, on average, for career progression. Some results suggest that
the quality of part-time jobs is on average lower, although the job satisfaction of part-
time workers is, on the whole, similar to that of full-time employees.
A two-phase process has been observed during the crisis when looking at non-
standard or atypical forms of employment. To start with, atypical employees were the
first to lose their jobs as it is easier to get rid of employees not enjoying as much
employment protection as standard employees. Then, when it came to dealing with
fluctuations in labour demand, new jobs were created on a temporary basis, rendering
them highly adaptable. Fixed-term and part-time contracts were used for their
flexibility compared to standard contracts, existing regulations on fixed-term and part-
time work were adapted and loosened to facilitate recourse to more flexible forms of
work contracts, and even more flexible forms of employment were introduced by
creating new types of contract.
It is important to evaluate that
developments in temporary employment across EU
member states show that: 1) much higher for employees aged 20–29 years (and for
those aged 30–39 years and above 60 years, although to a lesser extent) and lower for
those aged 50–59 years than for those employees aged 40–49 years; 2) slightly higher
for female than male employees; 3) higher for employees with low educational
attainment and lower for highly educated employees than for employees with medium
educational attainment, confirming the negative relationship between educational
attainment and the likelihood of holding a temporary contract; 3) much higher in
agriculture and some service sectors (extraterritorial organisations, arts and
entertainment, and education) than for employees in manufacturing, while they are
lowest in the financial, mining, and activities of households as employers sectors; 4)
slightly higher for employees working in medium-sized companies (20–49 employees)
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