Abstract
While the rate of part-time work has been consistent in the EU15 in the period 2000–2005, Italy has seen a large rise in women’s part-time work over that period. The likely cause of this rise in women’s part-time work is presumed to be the Italian enactment of the EU Part-Time Work Directive. Before 1984 Italian legislation had little provision for part-time work, and the Italian rate was well below the European average. But, the weak 1984 legislation was repealed by the then-conservative government to make way for the new directive adopted in 2000, and subsequently revised. As well as providing a clearer legislative framework on issues such as flexible working by part-timers, part-time work was claimed to offer important solutions to the Italian labour markets including reducing unemployment, increasing women’s employment and enhancing flexibility.
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Notes
- 1.
The pattern of results in Italy and the EU is similar if the threshold is changed to 34 h, the pattern is also similar using the European Labour Force Surveys variable that asks respondents directly whether they work part-time or full-time (Fernández 2007).
- 2.
For all of the statistical analyses where we imply that there is a difference between categories, this difference is statistically significant at the 5% level or below.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Catherine O’Brien for assistance with the data preparation and Tindara Addabbo and Giovanni Solinas for valuable feedback on earlier drafts. I would also like to thank the Aiel for the conference invitation that lead to this paper.
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Burchell, B.J. (2012). Quality of Work: The Case of Part-Time Work in Italy. In: Addabbo, T., Solinas, G. (eds) Non-Standard Employment and Quality of Work. AIEL Series in Labour Economics. Physica-Verlag HD. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7908-2106-2_9
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