ABSTRACT
Spain is of special interest to students of precarious employment for two reasons. First, its rate of temporary employment, at around one in three workers, is more than twice the European average, over three times the level of the G7 countries (see Table 10.1) and has stubbornly resisted several regulatory reforms designed to reduce it. Spain is an outlier; only Poland comes close. Second, the feminization of employment has been astonishingly rapid. Women’s employment has almost trebled since 1985, bringing what was by far the lowest female participation rate in Europe close to the average for the EU15. However, unlike many other countries, part-time employment has played a limited role in this expansion. One in five women in Spain were working part-time by 2008, along with just 3 per cent of
Table 10.1 Temporary employees, selected countries, 2006
% of all employees % who are women
United States 4.2 48.2 Ireland 4.2 56.0 Australia 5.2 55.3 United Kingdom 5.6 56.0 Hungary 6.7 42.5 Denmark 9.6 56.5 Turkey 12.7 20.4 France 12.9 50.0 Italy 13.0 50.2 Canada 13.0 51.9 Germany 14.2 46.2 Japan 14.3 65.6 The Netherlands 16.2 50.3 Finland 16.4 61.9 Sweden 16.8 56.0 Portugal 20.2 50.0 Poland 27.3 43.9 Spain 34.4 46.2 European Union 15 14.7 49.1 G7 countries 11.6 49.5
men (see methodological note below). Spain illustrates a number of issues in gender and labour market segmentation analysis and shows the importance of analysing precarious employment in a social, political and historical context. While Spain’s experience and the politics that have sustained it are unique, many instructive parallels can be drawn with South Korea, a quite distinct society.
