Leave of Absence and Part-time Retirement: Ways of Providing More Job Opportunities?

Abstract

The municipal council in Pitei, northern Sweden, decided at the end of 1983 to make it easier for the municipally-employed to take leave of absence or part-time retirement. The new policy aimed to improve the opportunities for people without a job to obtain one. It was assumed that with more generous rules, both vacancies and replacements would increase. In this article some of the changes that have taken place in Pitei since the experiment started are presented. The number of cases of leave of absence and parttime retirement was substantially augmented in 1984 as compared to the preceding year. More importantly, a considerable increase in days filled by replacements was found, also after having controlled for work-force changes and replacement chains. During the following two years the number of replaced days continued to be high, but after the controls mentioned it was observed that the level successively approached what it had been originally. The figures for 1986 were just above those for 1983. The estimation here is that the changes due to cases of leave of absence and part-time retirement granted in 1984-1986 correspond to between 29 and 49 full-time jobs lasting for a year. The majority of these jobs must be attributed to cases from 1984. The changes thus seem to have been of a temporary character, and the paper therefore concludes by discussing some conceivable reasons for this and the possibility of obtaining more permanent results.