Abstract
Research on part-time work has concentrated over many decades on the experiences of women but male part-time employment is growing in the UK. This article 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 job-satisfied compared to their full-time peers? A fundamental part of both interrogations is whether men's part-time employment varies by occupational class. The article is motivated by the large body of work on female part-timers. 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 those contentious ideas to provide new insights into male, rather than female, part-time employment. Based upon analysis of a large quantitative data set, 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. The article asks whether decreasingly satisfied male part-time workers should be termed "ungrateful slaves?" It unpacks the "grateful slave" metaphor and, after doing so, rejects its value for the ongoing analysis of part-time jobs in the formal labor market.
Highlights
Women have long dominated the extensive part-time labour market in the UK
Multiple studies of the labour market show increases in the number of male part-timers during and after the great recession and, further, that these increases were associated with a heavier concentration of men in lower level occupations and in lower waged jobs, alongside an up-swing in levels of involuntary male part-time working as more men struggled to find suitable full-time opportunities in a tightening labour market (Belfield et al 2017; Bell and Blanchflower 2018; Nightingale 2019)
The three temporal measures used to signal quality work-time showed full-time disadvantage: in addition to working longer usual hours, male full-timers were more likely than part-timers to work extended hours, at speed and to tight deadlines. These temporal challenges to job quality are more traditionally associated with higher-level jobs (AUTHORS), and we look at occupation below, but it is clear that part-timers overall did fare better than full-timers when work-time job quality is measured this way
Summary
Women have long dominated the extensive part-time labour market in the UK. Given the substantially higher number of female than male part-timers, debates around part-time employment are justifiably dominated by women’s experiences (AUTHORS 2015, 2018; Nicolaisen et al 2019; Ellingsaeter and Jensen 2019; O’Reilly and Fagan 1998; Tomlinson and Durbin 2014). The proportion of men working part-time has grown, boosted by post-recessionary labour market developments. At the time of writing (2019), we are at the end of a post-recessionary decade marked by austerity politics, rising levels of financial uncertainty and growing precariousness in work. This feature of 2008-9 is due, in large part, to changes to worktime (Lallement 2011): overall hours fell and part-time working rose, including for men. The global rise of the platform (or gig) economy has compounded concerns about the proliferation of precarious working patterns (Huws et al 2018; Warhurst et al 2017)
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