Temporary employment and work‐life balance in Australia

Inga Laß,Mark Wooden

doi:10.20377/jfr-357

Abstract

While it is often believed that temporary forms of employment, such as fixed-term contracts, casual work and temporary agency work, provide workers with more flexibility to balance work and private commitments, convincing empirical evidence on this issue is still scarce. This paper investigates the association between temporary employment and work-life balance in Australia, using longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey for the period 2001 to 2017. In contrast to previous studies, we compare results from pooled cross-sectional and fixed-effects regressions to investigate the role of time-constant unobserved worker characteristics in linking temporary employment and work-life outcomes. The results show that, after accounting for job characteristics and person-specific fixed-effects, among women only casual employment is unequivocally associated with better work-life outcomes than permanent employment. For men, we mostly find negative associations between all forms of temporary employment and work-life outcomes, but the magnitudes of these associations are much smaller and mostly insignificant in fixed-effects models. This result suggests that male temporary employees have stable unobserved traits that are connected to poorer work-life balance.

Highlights

IntroductionProfound changes in both the labour market and the home sphere – such as increased female labour force participation, the trend towards more involved fatherhood, and the increase in electronic work communication (which has facilitated a greater blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure) – have resulted in researchers paying increased attention to how workers balance the demands of the work sphere and other areas, especially the family sphere
Profound changes in both the labour market and the home sphere – such as increased female labour force participation, the trend towards more involved fatherhood, and the increase in electronic work communication – have resulted in researchers paying increased attention to how workers balance the demands of the work sphere and other areas, especially the family sphere
They are more satisfied with their work-life balance (WLB) and have the lowest work-family conflict (WFC), both according to the overall index and the individual items it consists of

Summary

Introduction

Profound changes in both the labour market and the home sphere – such as increased female labour force participation, the trend towards more involved fatherhood, and the increase in electronic work communication (which has facilitated a greater blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure) – have resulted in researchers paying increased attention to how workers balance the demands of the work sphere and other areas, especially the family sphere. The role that the type of employment contract, and especially contracts that provide for temporary or ongoing/permanent employment, plays in the relationship between work and private life has received little attention This is surprising given the intense debate about both the significance of temporary forms of employment and their potential impacts on workers (e.g., Booth et al 2002; Gash & McGinnity 2007; Giesecke & Groß 2003; Kalleberg et al 2000; Keller & Seifert 2013; McVicar et al 2019; Scherer 2009; van Lancker 2012; Watson 2005). Temporary work may provide workers with more schedule flexibility, suggesting an increased ability to wrap work around other commitments It is an empirical question whether temporary employment will have positive or negative effects on WLB. Hours of work is often found to be a critical moderating variable, with outcomes more favourable for workers employed on permanent contracts only once hours are controlled for (e.g., Hosking & Western 2008; Scherer 2009; Skinner et al 2012)

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Results

Conclusion