ABSTRACT
The growth in part-time employment in the face of high unemployment is one of the more distinctive features of labour market change in western Europe over the last 15 years. Discussion of part-time employment has increasingly been subsumed within an analysis of precarious work and the concept of the “flexible firm”. The feminization of the labour force has itself had at least some effects on the system of social reproduction. A comparative analysis of part-time work and the flexibility it might offer to employers necessarily involves discussion of gender roles and relations in the different countries of our study. Any “flexibilization” of part-time work is to a degree both gender and country specific. One of the major themes of debates in the discussion of part-time employment and the rise, or otherwise, of the flexible firm has been the association between part-time employment and the use of other forms of “non-standard” employment.
