The Institutionalization of Part-Time Work: Cross-National Differences in the Relationship between Part-Time Work and Perceived Insecurity.

The global rise of non-standard employment is often cited as one of the most important reasons for increasing levels of insecurity over the last 40 years. Yet, non-standard work is also one of the most underdeveloped factors in the literature on perceived worker insecurity. In this paper, we seek to understand the relationship between the most common form of non-standard employment, part-time work, and perceived worker insecurity. We focus on three types of perceived worker insecurity: cognitive job insecurity (perceived likelihood of job loss), labor market insecurity (perceived difficulty of finding a new, comparable job), and affective job insecurity (worrying about the potential threat of job loss). We develop a model of the “institutionalization of part-time work” and test hypotheses from this model using individual-level data from the 2005 ISSP linked to country-level data on various labor market characteristics. At the individual level, the results indicate that part-time work is generally associated with less labor market insecurity for men and less affective job insecurity for both men and women. At the country level, the size of the part-time workforce is not associated with average levels of cognitive job insecurity, but it is generally associated with lower average levels of affective job insecurity, and on a less consistent basis, labor market insecurity. Individual-level part-time work interacts significantly with several country-level indicators of flexible work and other labor market characteristics.