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This is an empirical investigation of Australian secondary school students who have part-time jobs. It is based on analyses of national longitudinal data covering a period of almost twenty years, from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s. Data from four separate age-based cohorts of young people are analysed, with a focus on the youngest cohort, that born in 1975, as well as additional data from a more recent sample of students who were in Year 9 in 1995. The extent of student involvement in part-time work is described, with reference to rates of employment and to average hours worked per week. Although there is some variation by age and year level, by the early 1990s one third of senior school students spent an average of nine hours per week in a part-time job. The background characteristics of student-workers are examined. Students who were lower school achievers were less likely to be employed, as were those from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds. These patterns, matching observations from other countries in which there are comparable or higher rates of student employment, indicate that some students may be disadvantaged in this part-time job market. Students had generally positive perceptions of their jobs. A large proportion enjoyed their work, and the money and the independence that it gave them, and they believed it would improve their future employment prospects. Apart from these subjective views of students, the longitudinal nature of these data enabled the outcomes of in-school employment to be investigated. (For complete abstract open document)

This research examines the impact of work-family reconciliation policies on gender inequality in the labour market, and on the division of paid work and care in the household. Policies designed to help families meet their work and care responsibilities have undergone considerable reform over the last fifteen years. The research aims to understand how this has affected the way that earning and caring are divided between mothers and fathers, and the implications of this for mothers’ labour market outcomes. The research compares two cohorts; the National Child Development Study (NCDS) tracks individuals born in 1958, and the British Cohort Study (BCS) those born in 1970. These cohorts experienced the key childbearing years of their early thirties on either side of a fairly sharp discontinuity in work-family reconciliation policy. The research aims to link this difference in policy environments to differences the way that couples in each cohort divide paid work and care, and in the labour market behaviour of mothers and the penalties they face when they are in employment. Logistic regression models are employed to quantify the magnitude and significance of the impact of cohort membership on the work and care outcomes of interest, controlling for other variables that affect these outcomes. Some case-level analysis of the data is also carried out; individuals representing typical family arrangements are highlighted, to demonstrate the relevance of the theoretical model and assist with hypothesis generation. Case stories illustrate the interplay of individual circumstances with policy and other external factors, in a way that is difficult to achieve using statistical methods. A key finding is that the younger cohort is less likely to report equal sharing of childcare than the older cohort, even after controlling for other factors that might influence the division of labour. This is also in spite of the finding that mothers in the younger cohort are more likely to be in work. This suggests progress to some extent, in that mothers perhaps find it easier to be in employment. However at the same time it represents a regressive step at the household level, as they not only continue to shoulder the majority of the care work, but are even more inclined to do so. Analysis of pay and status gaps also yields interesting results. The findings suggest that the penalty to motherhood in terms of labour market status accrues by virtue of the interrupted human capital accumulation that results from periods out of the labour market or working part time. However, the motherhood penalty in pay persists even after controlling for other wage determinants, suggesting that these gaps are a direct result of motherhood itself and not of the labour market behaviour changes that occur as a result. The research contributes theoretically and substantively to the wider literature on this topic. It brings together human capital perspectives with theories of gender, power and resources, and of the impact of policy on family life, and uses Amartya Sen’s capability approach to reconcile and move forward these ideas. It also contributes to the practical understanding of the impact of policy on the way that families reconcile work and care, and in particular the implications of policy for gender equality. Finally, its methodological contribution is in the use of a narrative approach to large-scale quantitative data, alongside more conventional statistical techniques, in order to further exploit the detailed, longitudinal data available.

This sociological study aims to understand full-time students’ decision to work part-time during their studies. The study also aims to understand the impact part-time work has on full-time students student life and career decisions. A qualiatative approach was used containing eight semi-structured interviews. The results were then analyzed with Hodkinson and Sparkes’ theory of careership and Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, field and capital. The results of the study were thematised into following categories: prospects and impacts of positions; the complex relationship between studies and work and the significance of acquired resource. The study show that the decision made by the students to participate in a part-time work during studies could indeed be explained through habitus. It further shows how the student is influenced by positions and other players and institutions in their field. Different resources maintained in the different fields were then part of the decision to work part-time during studies. The majority of the interviewed had full student aid and still worked part-time. For some of the interviewed, the reason for not wanting full student aid could be explained through positions in the field. Some of the students also stressed the possibility to work part-time as a consequence of a lot of spare time as a result of how the lectures and other educational learning opportunities were formed. It then showed that students had a complex relation to maintain a combination of part-time work with their studies.

The globalized world of the early 21st century has had great impact on the labour market. Employees of today are faced with many more options then before, increasing staff turnover rates to very high levels. This raises a lot of interesting aspects in how to create affective, mutual and long-lasting employer-employee relationships in the way the world works today. We have identified part-time working students as a key group to investigate since they possess skills and qualifications that is important to retain within an organisation. More particularly, the purpose of this study is to look at part-time working business student and their relationship towards their current employer, their perceptions, and based on that, how likely it is that they will stay within that organisation after graduation. This has led us to our research question:How part-time working business students’ perception of their current employer influences their future career decisions?In the research field of Employee Retention, there is a lack of research on part-time workers, and even more lacking on part-time working students. A theoretical foundation has been created based on different aspects of this subject. Motivational theories, dividing motivation to either Intrinsic or Extrinsic to cover what motivates students in different settings is considered. Branching from motivational theories, the Expectancy theory is used to analyse the reasoning between potential outcomes, in this case job alternatives. As decisions regarding job alternatives shapes the future careers of young workers, research on career decisions with a focus on students, point out specific implications regarding the target group. Finally, to complement our foundation with research regarding the students’ relationship with their current employers, research on Employee Retention adds different predictors of staff turnover. Those predictors are used in order to understand why students say or leave an organisation.In order to answer our research question and to gain deep understanding, we have conducted qualitative interviews with business student at Umeå University. The interviewed students all have different part-time jobs, as to cover as many different organisations as possible. The study shows that part-time working students are influenced in their career decisions by their perception of their current employers and experiences from the job. Regardless of positive or negative experience, intrinsic aspects are desired from future careers, as well as development opportunities. The extent to which the organisation shows an interest in the students’ future development also influences the students’ attitude towards the organisation. However, regarding staying in the current organisations after graduation, the students are faced with issues beyond their control, like geographical complications.

Legal status of persons taking care of children in the labor market This dissertation deals with the legal status of persons taking care of children with respect to their participation in the labor market. The dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal status of these persons, focusing especially on the employees' work-life balance. The dissertation deals in particular with the issues of working conditions of pregnant women, breastfeeding employees and employed mothers in the period of nine months after childbirth, and employees taking care of a child. The dissertation analyses the legal regulations of individual labor law institutes in relation to person taking care of children such as part-time work. The dissertation analyses atypical employment relationships resulting from the need to care of a child. In addition to providing an analysis of the current legislative framework, the dissertation also deals with contemporary case law, in particular the judicial decisions concerning part-time work. The dissertation describes overlaps with other areas of law, i.e. social security law and tax law, and identifies new trends such as the development of childcare services, in particular for children under three years of age, and process getting shorter parental leave resulting from changes...

Depuis les années 1970, le salariat à temps partiel s’étend sur les marchés de l’emploi allemand et français. Le rôle joué par l’intermédiation publique dans ce phénomène constitue l’objet de cette thèse. Nous l’étudions de manière comparative par l’immersion ethnographique dans quatre agences, par une analyse quantitative portant sur 2000 offres stockées et par une enquête socio-historique sur les dispositifs d’indemnisation. Grâce à ce matériau, nous mettons au jour les transactions temporelles auxquelles sont exposés les chômeurs durant leur traitement institutionnel. Au sein des agences d’intermédiation, les heures recherchées par les chômeurs jouent le triple rôle d’outil de gestion, d’outil d’intermédiation et d’outil d’arbitrage marchand. Elles sont mobilisées, manipulées et négociées durant les entretiens en face-à-face auxquels sont convoqués les chômeurs. Au terme des interactions, de nombreux profils de recherche sont révisés, en abaissant le nombre d’heures d’emploi souhaitées. Ce rationnement du temps d’emploi est organisé autour de trois modes de régulation, inégalement présents sur les différents terrains : une régulation par l’indemnisation-chômage, une régulation par les pratiques professionnelles des conseillers et une régulation par les progiciels informatiques d’appariement. Le temps d’emploi souhaité par les chômeurs apparaît ainsi comme un objet d’action publique. À partir de nos résultats empiriques, nous montrons que les logiques sociales de la rencontre bureaucratique établissent un lien étroit entre les ressources mobilisables dans l’interaction et les positions envisageables sur le marché de l’emploi. De plus, cette thèse présente les guichets d’intermédiation comme un niveau de régulation de l’emploi à part entière. / Since the 1970s, part-time employment has grown in the German and French labour markets. The relation between public intermediation and part-time employment is the subject of this thesis. Our comparative analysis is based on ethnographic immersion in four agencies, a quantitative analysis of 2000 job offers stored in the agencies files and a socio-historical inquiry concerning the unemployment benefit systems. With these data, we expose the temporal transactions experienced by the unemployed during their institutional treatment. Within the agencies, the working hours sought by the unemployed represent a tool with three functions: managing the registered users, matching employers and jobseekers, and arbitrating the relation between capital and labour. These hours are mobilized, manipulated and negotiated during the compulsory interviews between caseworkers and unemployed. Thus, many research profiles are modified, in the sens of lowering the desired amount of employment hours. This rationing of hours is organized around three modes of regulation, always perceptible but inequally significant in the various agencies: benefits-oriented regulation, professional regulation and computerized regulation. The working hours the unemployed look for appear as an object of public action. Based on our empirical results, we show how the configuration of bureaucratic encounters establish a close relation between the social resources mobilized during the interaction and the position on the labour market. In addition, this thesis present the employment agencies as an autonomous level of employment regulation.

The employment rate of young partnered women and partnered mothers increased considerably over the 1980s, while there was less change in the 1990s. This thesis explores these changes, with a focus on partnered mothers with young children. The objectives are to describe what the changes in female employment were, and to analyse why they might have occurred. ¶ The analyses were primarily quantitative, although they were put into context with extensive reviews of Australian and, where relevant, international literature. The primary source of data was Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Census data. Other data used included those from the ABS Child Care Surveys, Negotiating the Life Course Survey and the National Social Science Survey. ¶ Many changes in maternal employment were identified. The most notable change was the increase in the number and proportion of partnered mothers working part- time hours. Job characteristics also changed, with these women in full-time or part- time jobs more likely to be working in higher skilled professional and para- professional jobs in 2001, compared to 1981. For partnered mothers with a child aged less than one, the proportion working increased, but there was also evidence that more women were making use of maternity leave. ¶ Coinciding with these changes were a number of compositional changes, as women of succeeding birth cohorts were more educated, and more likely to delay marriage and childbearing. Attitudinal change was also evident, as people became more accepting of working wives. Attitudes to working mothers with young children changed less, with a strong preference for mothers to be at home when their children were young. Also over this period, there were many changes in infrastructure, policy and the labour market generally that had impacts on female employment opportunities and conditions. These changes are explored in detail, and their relationship to employment change examined. ¶ Because there were so many changes in these factors occurring over this period, the exact causes of employment change were difficult to identify. Also, an analysis of employment change is complicated because the causality of certain effects does not run in only one direction – there are more complex links between education, childbearing and employment that should be accounted for in explaining changes over time. Similarly, changes in supply of labour are difficult to disentangle from changes in demand for labour. ¶ Compositional changes were certainly important in explaining the growth in the proportion working, especially for younger women. These women were not only more highly educated in 2001, they were less likely to have children. For working mothers, the effect of increased education levels could be seen in the greater numbers working in higher status occupations. ¶ The analyses of infrastructure and policy change, particularly that of changes in income support and child care provision which were covered in some detail, did suggest that certain aspects of these broader changes were associated with changes in employment, at least for some sections of the population. Income support changes may have enabled more mothers, particularly those in low-income households, to stay at home with young children. This might be part of the reason for the slower growth in female employment in the 1990s, as payments to single-income families increased. ¶ The increased availability of formal child care was likely to have enabled more mothers to work, although the use of informal care, and parental-care only also grew over the 1980s and 1990s. The cost of care continues to be prohibitive for some families. ¶ Increases in part-time work continued even when the overall rate of employment slowed down. Changes in industrial relations, through award restructuring and the introduction of enterprise bargaining, were associated with an increased availability of part-time jobs. This sustained use of part-time work was congruent with the employment preferences of working mothers with young children. Also, the evidence presented shows that part-time work has grown in higher status as well as lower status jobs. ¶ Overall, while it was not possible to identify the exact causes of employment change, the compositional (education and childbearing changes in particular), attitudinal and broader infrastructure/policy changes were no doubt related.

Australian women’s participation in paid work has been and continues to be strongly influenced by gendered patterns of parental care. This thesis examines how children structure another dimension of economic stratification in Australia, hourly wages. Previous studies from the United States and Great Britain show women who care for children have lower wages than their childless counterparts and that this motherhood gap in pay is partly explained by mothers’ interruptions to employment and movement into part-time jobs. Outside the US and Britain fewer studies of the motherhood gap in pay have been undertaken. Compared to these two countries, Australia has lower maternal employment rates and higher rates of part-time work. These features may increase wage disparities between mothers and childless women in the Australian labour market. Australia, unlike Britain and the United States, has a history of centralised wage regulation, leading to a comparatively narrower wage distribution and a higher minimum wage. These institutional features may offer protection against downward wage mobility. This thesis investigates how motherhood influences the hourly wages of Australian women using panel data. Previous Australian research has documented static wage disparities, relying on cross-sectional data. My analysis draws on the first six waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey (2001-2006), a large, nationally representative panel survey. The thesis is comprised of three studies. First, I investigate the overall motherhood gap in pay in Australia in 2001. In aggregate, the mean wage of women with children is equal to that of childless women. After imputing a potential wage for mothers who are not employed, I show that the overall motherhood gap in pay would be considerably wider in Australia were fewer mothers to exit the labour force. This is because mothers without tertiary qualifications are less likely to be employed than mothers with a certificate, diploma or degree. Second, I use the panel design of HILDA to estimate female wage equations using fixed-effects regression. Controlling for differences in observed human capital, part-time work and unobserved heterogeneity, I find each child lowers wages by 6%. The analysis also reveals that mothers’ propensity to work part-time does not explain any of the Australian motherhood gap in pay. After incorporating detailed controls for time-varying job characteristics, I find that part-time wages are 14% higher than full-time wages. On average, the pay premium for part-time work more than offsets the pay penalty associated with one or two children. Third, I narrow my focus to Australian women experiencing a birth between 2001 and 2006, assessing whether the wage premium for part-time work extends to transitions at this point in the lifecourse. I investigate patterns of wage growth among mothers returning to employment within 3 years of a birth. My results reveal that Australian mothers who transition from full-time to part-time hours have significantly higher wage growth than mothers who remain in full-time employment. Taken together, my results suggest women’s part-time employment has a distinctive form in Australia. I find no evidence Australian mothers’ part-time employment constitutes a low-paid segment of the labour force. Isolating a causal explanation for the comparatively high wages of Australian women’s part-time employment is difficult, though two factors are likely to be important. First, Australian mothers’ participation in part-time employment rapidly increased during the 1970s and 1980s, a period when wages were largely regulated through collective agreements. Although wage determination has become more deregulated since the mid-1980s, the principle that part-time employees should receive pro rata wages does not appear to have been contested by Australian employers. This could be because demand for labour in feminised industries has remained strong. Second, decisions to remain attached to employment around childbirth could possibly be structured by the availability of part-time work. Rather than transition into a lower waged part-time job, Australian mothers may exit the labour force drawing on supports for stay-at-home mothers in the Australian family payment and taxation system. In the longer term, mothers who continue in part-time work may have fewer opportunities for upward mobility and flatter wage trajectories. As additional waves of HILDA become available, such divergences in wage trajectories will be able to be empirically investigated. This study examines female wages in a period of strong economic growth and low unemployment. Part-time employment may not be positively associated with wages in a macroeconomic context of lower demand for labour and rising unemployment. An interesting avenue for future research would be to compare how transitions into part-time work influence female wages across periods of strong and weak labour market growth.