The new employment order
IN most European countries, the call for a reduction in the length of the work week is front and centre. This article provides a brief examination of the major developments in this field over the past decade.'
MAXIME DURAND - 10 December 1993
HRS = Average total of hours worked in 1990
Source: OCDE, Marchand
International Viewpoint #252 January 1994
VER the past decade (1979-1990), the overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Sweden has grown by 2.2% per year. This rate of growth of production is lower than that of the increase in hourly productivity. We can therefore observe that the volume of work, defined as the total number of hours of work, has slightly decreased, by 0.2% every year.
How was this volume of work "shared"? By sharing, we mean the way this volume of work was divided between working people. The stagnation of the volume of work first led to an increase in unemployment and, as far as those who have a job are concerned, to a combination of reduction of the length of the work week and an increase in the number of workers.
From this point of view, it should be observed that the reduction of the length of the work week - by about 0.6% per year — in part played the expected role, in the sense that maintaining the length of the work week at its level at the beginning of the 1980s would have led to a supplemen-
### ECONOMY tary loss of jobs and an even quicker increase of unemployment in Europe. The number of workers was therefore able to grow, by about 0.4% per year, going from 99 to 103 million people (see table 1).
However, this reduction was insufficient. As Jacques Rigaudiat said, "it isn't because there is unemployment that we should reduce the length of the work week. It's because we haven't reduced the length of the work week that there is unemployment."* And this reduction was implemented in a very unequal way. We can ignore Sweden, where the length of the work week is about three hours less than in France, and examine the four major European countries. One can't help but be struck by the specific make-up of the situation in each country, which clearly indicates the variation in policies in the area of the length of the work week (see table I).
Germany sticks out in relation to the three other countries, insofar as - with the exception of 1983-84, following the 1981-82 recession - the length of the work week followed a general downward tendency. It has reached the French level once again after having crossed paths with it in 1981-82. But these two trajectories obviously do not have the same meaning. In France, with the adoption of the 39hour work week and the fifth paid week of holidays, the annual number of hours worked dropped massively in 1982, going from 1886 to 1808 hours, a drop of about 4% in a single year. But this movement was brutally interrupted, primarily because the legal length had become the same as the effective length. Since 1983, the length of the work week has essentially remained constant. Now merely affected by the fluctuations of the conjuncture, it even increased slightly during the 1988-90 upturn.
The same phenomenon can be seen in a less dramatic way in Italy. After having dropped at a fairly constant rate between 1983 and 1985, the length of the work week settled at a lower rate than in the neighbouring countries. Massive job losses in industry
But it is definitely Great Britain that has the most atypical profile. The significant drop recorded in 1980 and 1981 is the result of a structural adjustment. At the beginning of the Thatcher era, there were massive job losses in industry. Since the worst affected were poorly qualified workers often working weeks much longer than 40 hours, the average length of the work week dropped. Then there was an upward tendency that did not level off until the 1990 recession.
Table 1
Gross Domestic Product, volume of work, and number of workers
(growth in % from 1979-1989)
GDP
Germany
1.9
France
2.3
2.4
Haly
Britain
2.3
Sweden
Average
GDP = Gross Domestic Product
WOR = Number of workers
WOR HRS 0.5 1663 0.1 1678 0.4 -0.3 1727 0.5 -0.7 1638 0.7 +0.2 1480 0.4 -0.6 1665
VOL = Volume of work
LEN = Annual length of work
Great Britain has no legislation on the length of the work week and is opposed to the idea of there being any on a pan-European level. Based on full-time workers alone, the length of the work week goes up to 1900 hours per year, which is closer to the American rather than the European average.
The length of work is actually a difficult notion to measure, and this is often because of national specificities. One of the main sources of difficulty is part-time work. We can see that part-time work is
1. This article is largely based on a study done by Michel Husson, "Le volume de travail et son partage", Revue de PIRES No. 11, 1993. See also, "Europe: la durée du travail", Chronique Internationale IRES No. 18, September 1992.
2. Olivier Marchand, "Une comparaison internationale des temps de travail", Futuribles, No. 165-166, May-June 1992.
3. Jacques Rigaudiat, 'Réduire le temps de travail", Syros, 1993.
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Table 2
Length of work week in 1989 (in hours)
PAR%1979 = Part-time employment as % of total in 1979
PAR%1989 = Part-time employment as % of total in 1989
WOM%1989 = % of part-time work force composed of women in 1989
Source: OECD
International Viewpoint #252 January 1994 unequally spread out within the EEC. In Italy, 5.2% of employees work part-time; in Holland the figure is 30.9%; and the EEC average is 13.7%. The more part-time work there is, the more its average length decreases in relation to that of a full-time worker (see table 2).
The inclusion of part-time work statistics distorts international comparisons. As such, the average length of the work week remains greater than 40 hours for full-time workers in the EEC. This average only drops to 38 hours when part-time work is taken into account. The closeness of France and Britain is particularly revealing — these two countries appear to have work weeks of the same length and are close to
FUL PAR Germany 40.3 20.7 Belgium 38.1 20.4 France 39.9 21.9 Italy 38.6 24.9 Holland 39.1 16.5 Britain 43.6 17.3 EEC 40.6 19.2 FUL = Full-time workers
AVE
PAR%
37.7
13.0
36.0
11.7
37.7
12.2
5.2
30.9
22.6
13.7
PAR = Part-time workers the EEC average. In reality, they are two
AVE = Average of full-time and part-time workers very different cases, if part-time work is
PAR% = Percentage of workforce that is part-time taken into account. A full-time worker
Source: Marchand 1992 works 43.6 hours per week in Britain, whereas this figure is 39.9 for France.
With the exception of Sweden, part- time work has grown considerably throughout Western Europe. The rate of growth of part-time employment between 1979 and 1989 is on average 2.4% per year for the five countries under consideration while total employment only grew by
1.1%.
This rate of growth changes a lot from one country to the next. France has seen the fastest growth - between 1979 and
1990 part-time employment went from
8.2% to 12% of the total. In 1990, 24% of women in the job market had part-time jobs, compared to 17% in 1979. Generally speaking, part-time work affects women — in a ratio that goes from 65% of all part-time work in Italy to 91% of all part-time work in Germany (see table 3).
Along with the rise in part-time work, there is another significant tendency: the proportion of women in the workplace has increased in all the countries under consideration — surpassing the general increase in employment from 2% to 4%. In order to understand how these two tendencies are combined, it suffices to examine the division of the volume of work between women and men. This gives a more accurate idea of women's role in salaried economic activity, which is not properly reflected by a simple tallying of the number of women in the workforce.
Women's contribution is significantly lower. In France, women occupy 42.3% of jobs but do only 36.7% of total hours worked. These figures are respectively 40.7% and 33.2% for all the five Western Euro-
Table 3 Women in the workforce and part-time employment (in %) PAR% 1979 Germany 11.4 Austria 7.2 Belgium 6.0 Denmark 22.7 Spain -France 8.2 Greece -Ireland 5.1 Italy 5.3 Norway 25.3 Holland 16.6 Portugal 7.8 Britain 16.4
23.6
Sweden EEC 9.6 28
PAR%1989 WOM%1989 13.2 90.5 8.8 88.8 10.2 89.6 23.7 79.4 4.8 77.2 12.0 83.1 5.5 65.7 8.1 68.2 5.7 64.7 26.6 81.8 33.2 70.4 5.9 69.8 21.8 87.0 23.2 83.7 13.2 82.9 pean countries taken together. However, this does not change the fact that women's participation in the workforce has grown.
### Women and part-time employment
The role played by the rise of women's part-time employment in the sharing out of the volume of work and in the reduction of average length of the work week has been a striking feature of the last decade. Its significance is better demonstrated through an examination of job creation between 1979 and 1989 — coupled with the understanding that there are clear variations that originate in numerous individual histories of entry onto the labour market, departure into retirement or unemployment, shifts from full-time to part-time work, and so forth.
We can observe that the gender statistics for the four million net jobs created between 1979 and 1989 in the five countries under consideration are in no way comparable to those of the population already employed (see table 4). This job creation was only carried out following upon the destruction of 732,000 jobs
Changes in the work force between 1979 and 1989
Total employment
International Viewpoint #252 January 1994 employing men, more than compensated by the creation of 4.7 million jobs for women.
In Europe, the rise in the number of women employed has been
Germany accompanied by an
France absolute decline in the number of jobs held by Italy men. A more detailed
Britain examination shows that
Sweden
France and Britain are largely at the source of Total this phenomenon. Over the ten years under examination, these two countries respectively eliminated 5.9% and 1,7% of male employment. Only Germany has bucked the trend, and has managed to create male employment.
The second important statistic is that
83% of jobs created in Europe are part- time jobs. This largely overlaps the preceding figures, insofar as part-time work and women's work are two closely linked phenomena. Once again, France and Britain occupy a special place; the number of full-time jobs dropped in these two contries between 1979 and 1989. In France,
649,000 full-time jobs were lost (3.2% of the total) and 334,000 (1.6% of the total)
were lost in Britain. In Germany, part- time employment makes up half of the jobs created, but plays only a secondary role in Italy and Sweden.
We can develop an even more synthetic vision of the sexual division of the volume of work by examining total hours worked. Between 1979 and 1989, the
ROW
HARDER!
EXECUTIVE
PAY
Table 4 (thousands) volume of male work dropped by 6.5 billion hours — a figure largely reflecting the elimination of full-time jobs. At the same time, the volume of salaried work carried part-time work.
Once again, it is in Britain and, above all, in France that these figures are the most striking. In France, the volume of work dropped by 2.7 billion hours, corresponding essentially to the elimination of male jobs. 250 million additional hours were created for women, corresponding to fewer than 140,000 full-time jobs. Suffice it to say that in France women in the workplace — whose number grew by 900,000 over this period — had to be satisified with the "sharing" of a volume of work growing at a snail's pace. And this was only possible because 81.5% of new employment for women were part-time jobs.
WASSERMAN
Part-time employment
Total Men Women
699 630
The extreme case of France in this domain clearly demonstrates the central ambiguity of the evolution of women's employment in Europe. On one hand, the growth of unemployment has not claimed women's employment as a variable for adjustment; the aspiration of women to work has remained sufficiently strong that a "return to domestic life" has not played this role. But in exchange for this favorable evolution, part-time employment has played a central part in job-creation for women.
A detailed examination of the statistical balance sheet of the last decade underlines the absolute necessity of a reduction of the work week. This balance sheet shows that European capitalism does not have the necessary growth potential for the creation of enough jobs to fight unemployment.
But above all, it can be seen that women's part-time work has played a key role, much more important in practice than what one might imagine — and this poses the need for an alternative in very clear terms. The continuation of current trends would tend inexorably to polarise the active population around three axes: growing unemployment; full-time male employment; and part-time women's employment - obviously, with all the intermediary positions of unstable employment. Alternative vision for Europe
A massive reduction of the length of the work week charts an alternative course, since it aims to provide employment for all, women and men — at the same time aligning the situation of one gender with the other. Here we have an all-round social and feminist demand, inspired by a profound aspiration for equality - and which would be the pillar of an alternative vision for Europe. *
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