ILR Review

The present overview on existing research addresses the double implication of working-time standards as legal (or contractual) norms, on the one hand, and socially established normality, on the other. Looking primarily at the evidence on the statutory 35-hour week in France, the author discusses the question of how changes in norms as stipulated by law or collective agreements may affect working-time practices in the society. Given the specific institutional and policy tradition of statist intervention in France, a comparison with the effects of the contractual 35-hour week on actual hours in the West German metal industry highlights particular strengths and weaknesses of the French approach. While the empirical evidence underscores the crucial importance of statutory norms and the interaction between governments and social actors, it equally reveals the increasing difficulties to set limits to normal hours for growing shares of the workforce just by setting statutory or collective norms. The transformation of new working-time norms into normality leading to a generalized shorter standard workweek is a long-term social process that requires continual intervention of actors at various levels and must be embedded in agreements both at the workplace and within households.

The authors investigate the relationship between market transition and work hours in urban China. Regression analysis of data from the 2006 Chinese General Social Survey reveals a negative relationship between economic marketization, measured at the province level, and the likelihood that an employee works standard hours. Standard hours are less common among those working for smaller employers, which are less subject to outside scrutiny. This relationship between employer size and standard hours is stronger in more marketized regions. These findings support the authors’ argument that standard work hours are deinstitutionalized as employers strive for low cost and flexibility in China’s increasingly marketized but poorly regulated economy. Comparisons of the Chinese experience with recent trends in the United States reveal remarkable similarities in the weakening of social employment contracts precipitated by the ascendency of markets and the systematic disempowering of labor.

The existence of working-time accounts played an important role in overcoming the negative effects of the Great Recession in Germany. The authors’ analysis of data on establishments with a works council and at least 20 employees from the WSI Works Council Survey shows that the presence and influence of trade unions and the direct impact of the economic crisis are factors that increased the probability of reducing time credits, or building up time deficits on working-time accounts, to safeguard employment. Individual characteristics, such as the proportion of female workers or the proportion of highly qualified employees, had a negative impact on the ability to use working-time accounts. No significant differences were found between the general use of working-time accounts and their use in consequence of the economic crisis. This could be an indication that working-time accounts need to be well established in order to be useful for safeguarding jobs during an economic crisis.

The authors use matched employer-employee panel data on Belgian private-sector firms to estimate the relationship between wage/productivity differentials and the firm’s labor composition in terms of part-time work and gender. Findings suggest that the groups of women and part-timers generate employer rents but also that the origin of these rents differs (relatively lower wages for women, relatively higher productivity for part-timers). Interactions between gender and part-time work suggest that the positive productivity effect is driven by male part-timers working more than 25 hours, whereas the share of female part-timers is associated with wage penalties. The authors conclude that men and women differ with respect to motives for reducing working hours and the types of part-time jobs available to them: women often have to accommodate domestic constraints by downgrading to more flexible jobs, whereas male part-time work is frequently related to training and collectively negotiated reductions in hours that do not affect hourly pay.

Using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data for the year 2009, the authors evaluate how vertical and horizontal job segregation explains the differential between full-time and part-time pay for prime-age women in four European countries: Austria, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The selected countries are representative of different welfare state regimes, labor market regulations, and extents and forms of part-time employment. Full-time hourly wages exceed part-time hourly wages, especially in market-oriented economies, such as Poland and the United Kingdom. Results using the Neuman-Oaxaca decomposition methods show that most of the full-time–part-time wage gap is driven by job segregation, especially its vertical dimension. Vertical segregation explains an especially large part of the pay gap in Poland and the United Kingdom, where, more than elsewhere, part-timers are concentrated in low-skilled occupations and the wage disparities across occupations are quite large.

Unpredictability is a distinctive dimension of working time that has been examined primarily in the context of unplanned overtime and in male-dominated occupations. The authors assess the extent to which female employees in low-skilled retail jobs whose work schedules are unpredictable report greater work–life conflict than do their counterparts with more predictable work schedules and whether employee input into work schedules reduces work–life conflict. Data include measures from employee surveys and firm records for a sample of hourly female workers employed across 21 stores of a U.S. women’s apparel retailer. Results demonstrate that, independent of other dimensions of nonstandard work hours, unpredictability is positively associated with three outcomes: general work–life conflict, time-based conflict, and strain-based conflict as measured by perceived employee stress. Employee input into work schedules is negatively related to these outcomes. Little evidence was found that schedule input moderates the association between unpredictable working time and work–life conflict.

Studies of paid work hours have overlooked preferences partners have with respect to each other’s hours. The author uses the National Survey of Families and Households to examine how closely partners agree on the number of hours each should work. He also examines the extent to which actual hours reflect both partners’ preferences and factors that moderate the efficacy of each partner’s wishes. The analysis offers important new insights into work hours, work-hour constraints, and the negotiation of work hours between partners. The results indicate that partners often disagree about the number of hours each should work, and that although men’s hours reflect their own and their partner’s preferences equally, women’s hours are more closely tied to their own preferences. Still, changes in men’s and women’s actual hours are heavily influenced by factors that do not reflect their own or their partner’s preferences.