Workers with few hours – who secures their social rights?
A new special issue of European Journal of Industrial Relations edited by Trine P. Larsen and Anna Ilsøe takes a closer look at how social dialogue can improve wages and working conditions for employees working few hours. The focus is on how collective bargaining and similar activities can create, maintain or reduce the risks associated with employment contracts of just a few hours, such as marginal part-time work, temporary work and contracts without a fixed number of hours. It also sheds light on changes in welfare institutions and systems for the protection of these groups of workers.
In the introduction to the special issue, Anna Ilsøe and Trine P. Larsen focuses on the risks associated with marginal part-time employment and the impact collective bargaining and social protection have on these jobs, depending on whether they are categorized as employed or self-employed.
The first article examines the varying levels of protection for part-time workers across different welfare and labour market regimes (France, Germany and the UK) and examines the extent to which the social partners – trade unions, employers and legislators – mitigate or create inequality in the labour market.
The following article draws on power resource theory in combination with segmentation literature to explore unions' ability to tackle precarious employment. The article incorporates illustrative company cases from Denmark, Germany and the UK, each of which focuses on the trade unions' reactions to temporary agency work in the manufacturing industry.
The third article examines recent legislative changes and trends in marginal part-time work compared to other forms of atypical work in the creative industries in the Netherlands. The analysis shows that although creative workers are highly skilled, precarious employment is widespread and there are large variations in the processes of flexibility and marginalization between different subsectors of the creative industries.
The fourth article sheds light on how the social partners use social dialogue to increase weekly working hours for employees in the hotel and restaurant sector. The article compares Denmark with Norway and Ireland and shows that the partners have taken initiatives in all three countries, but that the initiatives have had the greatest impact in Denmark.
Finally, the fifth and final article compares the importance of legislative changes to zero-hour and on-call contracts in Finland and the Netherlands. The authors conclude that involvement of trade unions and employers in the regulation of pay and working conditions is key, and that a purely legislative track challenges the very foundation of labor market models. By extension, there are signs that Finland is potentially moving away from Nordic models of labor-market regulation.
Read the full special issue 'Workers with few hours – who secures their social rights? – The role of social dialogue and collective bargaining' edited by Trine P. Larsen and Anna Ilsøe. Published by the European Journal of Industrial Relations, November 2024.