Abstract
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of part-time work on absolute wages. The empirical focus is wages and working hours in three selected sectors within private services in the Danish labour market – industrial cleaning, retail, hotels and restaurants – and their agreement-based regulation of working time and wages. Theoretically, this analysis is inspired by the concept of living hours, which addresses the interaction between working hours and living wages, but adds a new layer to the concept in that the authors also consider the importance of working time regulations for securing a living wage.Design/methodology/approachThe paper builds on desk research of collective agreements and analysis of monthly administrative register data on wages and working hours of Danish employees from the period 2008-2014.FindingsThis analysis shows that the de facto hourly wages have increased since the global financial crisis in all three sectors. This is in accordance with increasing minimum wage levels in the sector-level agreements. The majority of workers in all three sectors work part-time. Marginal part-timers – 15 hours or less per week – make up the largest group of workers. The de facto hourly wage for part-timers, including marginal part-timers, is relatively close to the sector average. However, the yearly job-related income is much lower for part-time than for full-time workers and much lower than the poverty threshold. Whereas the collective agreement in industrial cleaning includes a minimum floor of 15 weekly working hours – this is not the case in retail, hotels and restaurants. This creates a loophole in the latter two sectors that can be exploited by employers to gain wage flexibility through part-time work.Originality/valueThe living wage literature usually focusses on hourly wages (including minimum wages via collective agreements or legislation). This analysis demonstrates that studies of low-wage work must include the number of working hours and working time regulations, as this aspect can have a dramatic influence on absolute wages – even in cases of hourly wages at relatively high levels. Part-time work and especially marginal part-time work can be associated with very low yearly income levels – even in cases like Denmark – if regulations do not include minimum working time floors. The authors suggest that future studies include the perspective of living hours to draw attention to the effect of low number of weekly hours on absolute income levels.
Highlights
The scholarly debate around living wages and minimum wages have regained momentum in the last few decades as western economies have witnessed a rapid growth in low-wage work, earnings inequalities, in-work poverty and contracts other than full-time employment, in private services (Garnero et al, 2014; Parker et al, 2016)
Much of the literature focusses on Anglo-Saxon countries – primarily the UK and the USA, where the living wage debates often are organised around various wage-indicators, the effects of Living hours minimum wages and national wage-setting systems on employment (Manning, 2016), under pressure low-wage work (Bosch, 2009), earnings inequalities, including gender gaps (Rubery et al, 2005)
Most living wage calculations are based on the assumption of full-time work, even if recent research emphasises that full-time employment is no guarantee for many workers (Anker, 2011; Warren, 2015)
Summary
The scholarly debate around living wages and minimum wages have regained momentum in the last few decades as western economies have witnessed a rapid growth in low-wage work, earnings inequalities, in-work poverty and contracts other than full-time employment, in private services (Garnero et al, 2014; Parker et al, 2016). Much of the literature focusses on Anglo-Saxon countries – primarily the UK and the USA, where the living wage debates often are organised around various wage-indicators, the effects of Living hours minimum wages and national wage-setting systems on employment (Manning, 2016), under pressure low-wage work (Bosch, 2009), earnings inequalities, including gender gaps (Rubery et al, 2005). Less researched is the situation in the Nordic countries and the importance of variables other than pay such as weekly working hours and working time regulations for securing living wages. Similar to other living wage research, the national working time regulations tend to be overlooked by Ilsøe (2016), it seems just as pivotal as national wagesetting systems regarding employees’ ability to secure living wages. Most national working time regulations, besides setting a strict threshold for the maximum length of the working week, encounter various regulations on work scheduling and distribution of working time, but rarely include a minimum threshold for working hours (Berg et al, 2004; Seifert, 2005)
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