Working conditions and union dissolution for cohabiting and married couples in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

This study uses the British Household Panel Survey to assess how working conditions affect union dissolution, distinguishing between cohabiting and married couples. While previous studies focus on labour income and measures related to working time, we address three new working conditions of the 24/7 economy, namely temporary employment, promotion opportunities, and job responsibility. We find important differences between married and cohabiting couples. In general, married partners have stronger relationship commitments, but they also tend to be more specialized, have greater job security, higher income, and lack of job responsibility, all of which appear to protect the marriage union. In contrast, those in cohabiting unions are more susceptible to demanding working conditions when these are experienced by both partners. Part-time employment and irregular work schedules put cohabitation at risk.

KEYWORDS:

• 24/7 economy
• working conditions
• cohabitation
• marriage
• union dissolution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that the possibility of including unions in which only the man was in paid employment was considered, but due to the focus of the paper on the joint working conditions of both partners, it was decided against.

2 Recent research has outlined possible problems of selection that might occur when cohabitation and marriage are addressed together (Perelli-Harris et al., 2017; Perelli-Harris et al., 2019), in this research we have tried to avoid it by running separate analyses for cohabitation and marriage.

3 The dependent variable is created using both the identifier of the household and reports of partners reporting if they are living together or not.

4 In the United Kingdom, premarital cohabitation is becoming the most widespread form of entry into marriage (Berrington, 2001). In the early 1990s, the percentage of individuals cohabiting prior to their first marriage was higher than 60%, but it has risen to close to 75% a decade later (Beaujouan & Ni Bhrolcháin, 2011), and nowadays, it is common to cohabit prior to marriage (Hiekel & Fulda, 2018).

5 We dropped couples with missing information in working hours, extra time, work schedule and temporary employment. If a couple had missing information on those four items, it was not included in the analyses, but if a couple had missing information in one, two or three out of the four items remained in the sample. Likewise, we do not drop any couple in promotion opportunities and job responsibility because these two variables were not asked to self-employed individuals and had a considerable amount of missing cases.

6 There is no overtime for self-employed workers. For full-time self-employed workers, we assign them the median number of overtime hours worked by full-time employees working for someone else. Similarly, self-employed workers who work only part-time are assigned the median number of overtime hours worked by part-time employees working for someone else.

7 This variable refers to the mean age between partners in the couple.

8 To keep in the model the highest possible number of couples, a missing category for all the categorical variables has been included.

9 By episode, we mean the time between the start of the risk period and an event occurring or being censored.

10 We also find that missing information in female income share is expected to increase the risk of cohabitation dissolution (p-value <.1).

11 Missing information in education is associated with a decrease in the risk of cohabitation dissolution.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hezkuntza Saila, Eusko Jaurlaritza.

Notes on contributors

Iñigo Fernández-Iturrate

Iñigo Fernández-Iturrate obtained his PhD in 2016 at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. From 2019, he works in the Department of Education of the Basque Government.

Arnstein Aassve

Arnstein Aassve is full Professor at Bocconi University. Until recently he was the Dean of the Undergraduate School. From 2018, he is the director of the PhD program, and he is running his second ERC grant: Institutional Family Demography (I-FAMID).

Elena Cottini

Elena Cottini is an Assistant Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore and she is member of the Centre for Corporate Performance at Copenhagen Business School.