Working Time In Transition

The organization of working time in advanced industrial nations is currently in the midst of a profound shift away from standard hours and toward greater flexibility and diversity of schedules. This shift has major implications for industrial relations systems, the relative power of employers and unions, and the politics of labor markets and gender equity. This volume explores the broad significance of these developments cross-nationally in Europe, the United States, and Japan. The essays examine technological, and market changes that place a premium on greater flexibility, the successes and limits of trade union campaigns for shorter standard hours as a response to employment crises in the 1970s and 1980s, the impact of reducing standard work hours upon leisure time, the increasing diversity of employee preferences, and the decline in the male norm's influence on working time and working life. Developments in part-time and temporary work, as well as more innovative policies in parental leave, job sharing, and flexible retirement, are analyzed. Placing these developments in broad historical and theoretical perspective, the authors reveal the centrality of time as a contested terrain of workplace and gender politics. Working Time in Transition elucidates the underlying structural and political conflicts that lead to changes in working time regimes in Western nations and Japan. It will be of interest to employers, union leader, state and federal policy makers, economists, and corporation and union researchers. Author note: Karl Hinrichs is Research Associate at the Centre for Social Policy Research at the University of Bremen. William Roche is Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations at University College in Dublin. Carmen Siranni is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University and the coeditor of the Labor and Social Change Series.

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2007. Lee, McCann and Messenger trace the theoretical background of the concept of working time before examining recent trends in working time laws in developing countries and countries in transition. The study then shifts its focus to developments in selected countries, considering both broad trends in working time at a national level and the structure and dynamics underlying these trends. The authors provide a remarkable set of policy suggestions that preserve health and safety, are ?family- friendly?, promote gender equality, enhance productivity and facilitate workers? choice and influence over their working hours. This book will be of great interest to policy-makers engaged with working conditions or health and safety, labour market experts, trade union leaders and workers? organizations, as well as academics and researchers in the fields of industrial relations, labour economics and labour law.

Working time is a crucial issue for both research and public policy. This book presents the first comprehensive analysis of both paid and unpaid work time, integrating a unique discussion of overwork, underwork, shortening of the working week, and flexible work practices. Time at work is affected by a complex web of evolving culture and social relations, as well as market, technological, and macroeconomic forces, and institutions such as collective bargaining and government policy. Using a variety of new data sources, the authors review the latest trends on working time in numerous countries.

Work Time is a sociological overview of a complex web of relations that shapes much of our experience of work and life yet often goes without critical examination. Cynthia Negrey examines work time past and present, exploring structural economic change and the gender division of labor to ask: what are the historical, cultural, public policy, and business sources of current work-time practices? Topics addressed include work-time reduction in the US culminating in the 40-hour statute of 1938, recent trends in annual and weekly hours, overtime, part-time work, temporary employment, work-family integration, and international comparisons. She focuses on the US in a global context and explores how a new political economy of work time is taking shape. This book brings together existing knowledge from sociology, anthropology, history, labor economics, and family studies to answer its central question and will change the way upper-level students think about the time we devote to work.

Ania Zbyszewska's feminist, socio-legal study of the European working time regime examines its historical development and influence in the Polish working time reform, focusing on the gendered dynamics and the relationship between the EU and national politics and law. This study will be of interest to legal and feminist scholars, and policy makers.

The concept of transitional labor markets (TLMs) is an attempt to address and analyze the factors and policies that can prevent high levels of unemployment. Ten contributions from international scholars of economics, sociology, and law draw upon both quantitative longitudinal panel study data and qualitative case study material to explore the implications of TLMs in Spain, Sweden, Ireland, Britain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands. Following a section on theoretical and methodological issues are articles that discuss labor market transitions, peripheral, and part time labor. The final section deals with employment contracts and company practices. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

In response to mounting debt crises and macroeconomic instability in the 1980s, many countries in the developing world adopted neoliberal policies promoting the unfettered play of market forces and deregulation of the economy and attempted large-scale structural adjustment, including the privatization of public-sector industries. How much influence did various societal groups have on this transition to a market economy, and what explains the variances in interest-group influence across countries? In this book, Agnieszka Paczyńska explores these questions by studying the role of organized labor in the transition process in four countries in different regions—the Czech Republic and Poland in eastern Europe, Egypt in the Middle East, and Mexico in Latin America. In Egypt and Poland, she shows, labor had substantial influence on the process, whereas in the Czech Republic and Mexico it did not. Her explanation highlights the complex relationship between institutional structures and the “critical junctures” provided by economic crises, revealing that the ability of groups like organized labor to wield influence on reform efforts depends to a great extent on not only their current resources (such as financial autonomy and legal prerogatives) but also the historical legacies of their past ties to the state. This new edition features an epilogue that analyzes the role of organized labor uprisings in 2011, the protests in Egypt, the overthrow of Mubarak, and the post-Mubarak regime.