Adaptability — Flexible Working Arrangements

Executive Summary: The European Employment Strategy and National Employment Action Plans advocate the promotion of increased flexibility of working arrangements with the aim of making enterprises productive and competitive while achieving the required balance between flexibility and security. The extent of atypical working, including both part-time work and temporary contracts, has increased in Ireland in the past decade of so. In this, Ireland participates in an international trend of increased flexibility of working hours and contractual relationships. In more recent years, during the currency of the NEAP, the number of employees working either part-time or in non-permanent contracts has increased with the overall rapid increase in employment in the years 1997 to 2001. However, in proportional terms, their share of total employment has increased by little, if at all. Rates of flexibilisation of work thus continue to be lower in Ireland than elsewhere in the European Union. Given the relative scarcity of empirical information on atypical working in Ireland, Section 3 presents an exploration of part-time work and of employees on fixed-term and other temporary contracts, based mainly on data from the 1997 and 2000 waves of the Living in Ireland Survey. In Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, the majority of part-time work is done by women: in 2000 85% of all part-time workers were women. In cotrast to much of the international research findings, part-time work is associated with higher average hourly wages in Ireland. The wage premium associated with part-time work is particularly substantial for men, and remains even when we control for other relevant factors that influence wage rates. We also found that part-time employees are less likely than their full-time colleagues to have access to occupational pension schemes, and they are less likely to benefit from a range of employer-sponsored fringe benefits, including training. While a greater proportion of fulltime employees have very long tenure (exceeding 10 years) in their current jobs, we found little evidence to suggest that part-time jobs are particularly lacking in job security. For example, in 2000, 19% of full-time employees, and 13% of part-timers had been in their current job for less than 12 months. About 85% of employees in Ireland are on permanent contracts, with about 6% each in fixed term and casual contractual arrangements. Women working on fixed-term contracts earn less than permanent employees, but this is not the case among men, when we take other factors into consideration. Casual workers of both genders earn substantially less than permanent employees, even taking account of other relevant factors.