IER’s Trine P. Larsen and Anna Ilsøe (FAOS, University of Copenhagen, Denmark), have edited a special issue for the European Journal of Industrial Relations. It consists of contributions from a range of leading European scholars and looks at the role of social dialogue and collective bargaining to creating, maintaining or reducing the risks associated with employment contracts of few hours, such as marginal part-time work, temporary agency work and zero-hour contracts.

The new article written by Professors Tracy Warren and IER’s Clare Lyonette addresses two sizable gaps in knowledge concerning male part‐timers. Are men's part‐time jobs of lower quality than men's full‐time jobs? Are male part‐timers more or less satisfied with their jobs compared to their full‐time peers? For both questions, the article examines whether men's part‐time employment varies by occupational class.

The article is motivated by the large body of work on female part‐timers, even though male part-time work has been increasing in recent years. Its theoretical framework is rooted in one of the most controversial discussions in the sociology of women workers: the “grateful slave” debate that emerged in the 1990s when researchers sought to explain why so many women expressed job satisfaction with low‐quality part‐time jobs. Innovatively, this article draws upon and challenges those contentious ideas to provide new insights into male, rather than female, part‐time employment.

The results provide clear evidence of low‐quality male part‐time employment in the UK, when compared with men's full‐time jobs. Men working part‐time also express deteriorating satisfaction with jobs overall and in several specific dimensions of their jobs. Male part‐timers in lower occupational class positions retain a clear “lead” both in bad job quality and low satisfaction. For more details see here.

Clare Lyonette attended this year's Community, Work and Family conference, held in Malta from May 22nd-25th 2019. Clare presented two papers:

(i) one focusing on the Forces in Mind Trust-funded project on self-employment among the Armed Forces Community: 'The transition to self-employment among military veterans – identifying class differences in success and failure’, and

(ii) the other with Professor Tracey Warren from the University of Nottingham on their joint body of research on part-time employment: 'Poles apart? The impact of occupational class and hours of work on part-time job quality for women’.