ABSTRACT
Many, including the governments of Britain and the United States and their main opposition parties, do not believe that the unemployment problem has to be solved by reducing working hours and sharing the work around. In the case of reductions in working hours resulting from increased productivity the question does not arise: the reduction in working hours and the increases in pay are paid for by the increase in productivity and are negotiated between employers and workers. A rather different way of sharing work by reducing average hours worked is the idea of job-sharing in which a full-time job is split into two part-time jobs. Job-sharing is not the same as simply part-time working since it involves the splitting of a specific job. There is, however, one area where part-time work has not been widely adopted and where it might have considerable potential.
