ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two areas where part-time employment (PT) plays a key role: work-life balance (WLB) and activation policies. Since 1990, Spanish employment figures have shown a clear trend towards narrowing the gap with European averages. PT may have long been present in the Spanish informal economy, but it has always been marginal in the formal economy. In Spain, the idea of a single full-time (FT) job from adolescence to old age as a core element of social order was certainly reinforced by industrial relations system that prevailed in the pre-democratic era before 1975. In Spain a childcare provision argument may have also forecast significant growth of PT as female employment rates started to increase, given some important similarities to the British and Dutch systems in terms of welfare provision. Trade unions and employees sceptical about actual guarantees offered by PT contracts to employees in terms of income, access to social security and control over actual working-time arrangements.
