The regulation of working time as work-family reconciliation policy: Comparing Europe, Japan, and the United States

Abstract

This article compares working time policies in eight European countries, Japan, and the US, specifically policies that embody three goals: (1) reducing the full-time working week to less than the traditional standard of 40 hours; (2) guaranteeing workers an adequate number of paid days, annually, away from the workplace; and (3) raising the quality and availability of voluntary part-time work. While working time policies can help to free up parental caregiving time, they also have some potentially problematic consequences – including an associated rise in nonstandard-hour scheduling and the possibility of negative effects on gender equality.

Acknowledgements

This article originated when we were collaborating on a cross-national policy project under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. We are thankful to our colleagues at the OECD – especially Mark Pearson, Willem Adema and Paul Swaim – for their contributions. We are also grateful to Gary Burtless, Heather Boushey and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. Finally, we thank the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for intellectual and financial support.

Notes

1. A note on terminology: We use the terms “the regulation of working time” and “working time policies” to refer broadly to national and local legislation, public labor market regulations, and collective agreements that affect a large share of the workforce. We use the term “reduced-hour work” to refer to paid work at less than 40 hours per week. We use the term “part-time work” to mean work that is not considered, by national standards, to be “full-time”. Across our comparison countries, legal and statistical definitions of part-time work vary. In some, for example, the statistical definition of part-time work is less than 35 hours per week, in others, less than 30 hours per week; in the EU, the legal definition refers to someone whose normal hours of work are less than the normal hours of a comparable full-time worker. Finally, by the EU, we mean the EU-15 prior to the 2004 enlargement.

2. Fagnani and Letablier (2004) report that, in France, politicians arguing for work-time cuts adopted the slogan: travailler moins pour vivre mieux (“work less, live better”).

3. The meaning of maximum hours varies. In most cases, maximum hour policies mean that workers may not work above the set ceiling, while in others workers may not exceed the ceiling unless they opt to do so (see notes to Table 2).

4. This is also the case in Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, but collective bargaining coverage is much greater in those countries.

5. Carley (2003) also reports that the percentage of US workers in medium/large enterprises with any paid vacation fell from 96 percent in 1988 to 89 percent in 1997.

6. Public holiday laws vary widely across countries and, in some cases, employers can limit workers' rights to take off holidays and/or to be paid for them. For example, EU citizens generally have a statutory right to public holidays. However, in some member states – including France, Sweden and especially the UK – some employers may require employees to work on these days or to take them as part of annual holiday entitlements (Mercer 2003). In the US, the federal government designates ten public holidays and, in addition, some employers observe state and local holidays. However, many employers reserve the right to schedule employees to work on holidays, although employers are required by law to allow workers to observe religious holidays consistent with their beliefs and practices (salary.com 2006).

7. A table with detailed information on country-specific part-time work policies is available from the first author.

8. Figure 2 reports results calculated by the authors, using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) datasets, from various years in the mid-1990s to 2000. Japan is not included in the LIS.

9. Other factors, in addition to direct working time regulations, contribute to British men's long work hours. One is that, traditionally, British wives have worked short hours, partly due to a history of state policies aimed at creating demand for female part-time labor.

10. Evans et al. (2001) report a revealing finding about cross-national variation in working time preferences. An international survey, in 1994, asked workers if they would prefer a reduction in working hours or an increase in pay. Americans were less likely than Europeans to choose a reduction in working hours. But when no reference was made to the trade-off with earnings, a somewhat higher percentage of US workers than European workers replied that they wished to reduce their hours of work. Americans' preferences for long hours appear to be bound up with concerns about economic security, at least more so than among many of their European counterparts.

11. Here, we are considering the question of the effects of overtime regulations on average actual hours worked. A distinct and also important literature addresses the question: what is the effect of reducing workers' weekly hours on aggregate employment levels? This literature suggests that the impact is likely to depend on the mechanism used. If hours are subject to an absolute limit, new jobs may be created if employers hire new workers to supply the needed hours. If hours are limited by lowering the threshold above which overtime must be paid, or by raising overtime rates, employers might shed workers to compensate for the extra costs associated with paying the workers already employed. The empirical findings on this question are, in fact, mixed (see Hamermesh 2002 for a review). In addition, others have assessed the link between workers' actual hours and aggregate productivity. As with employment, the hours/productivity relationship is complex. Among the OECD countries, output-per-worker is highest in the US – largely due to Americans' long average hours. However, when output-per-worker-hour is compared, the US falls to eighth place among the OECD countries, falling below, for example, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. Some conclude that the US's comparatively lower productivity per hour is the result of compositional differences – arguing that many lower-productivity workers in the US would be unemployed elsewhere – although Mishel et al. (2005) refute that explanation. An alternative interpretation is that Americans' long hours may be in the range of diminishing returns with respect to productivity.

12. The effect of maximum hours regulation also seems apparent when we consider our ten countries. Carley (2003) reports that the gap in actual hours between the EU countries, on the one hand, and Japan and the US, on the other, is caused not just by a gap in normal/scheduled hours but also in the overtime and additional hours worked (which are higher in the latter two cases). Japan limits maximum hours but in general allows longer hours than those set in most EU countries, and the US is the one case among these ten with no restrictions on maximum hours. For an overview of the effects of working time regulations, see Rubery, Smith and Fagan (1998: 75). Drawing on variation in statutory and bargained normal hours across Europe, they concluded that “national working time regulations can be seen to have a major impact on usual working time”.

13. At the same time, the Directive includes a number of other components, many of which are clearly advantageous to workers. It requires minimum provisions related to daily rest, breaks, weekly rest periods and, as we have mentioned, annual leave.

14. These studies and others establish that parents perceive that shortening their working hours reduces their work-family conflict. Whether, and to what extent, parents spend those “freed-up” hours with their children is an empirical question that has received much less attention. One study that addresses this directly is also from the French case. According to a 2001 survey, among parents with children under age 12, 43 percent of French parents say that, since the enactment of the 35-hour week, they spend more time with their children (see Kamerman et al. 2003 for a review of research on the effects of the French law).

15. Whether women's working time preferences are different from men's – in some fundamental and enduring way – is a contested question. Catherine Hakim, for example, has long argued that while many women are career-oriented, substantial numbers are not – and it is their preferences, not constraints or institutional factors, that explain their relatively low working hours compared to men's (Hakim 1997). Others argue that women's intrinsic preferences cannot be identified until gendered expectations and institutional constraints erode (Gornick and Meyers 2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janet C. Gornick

Janet C. Gornick is Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), and Professor of Political Science at Baruch College, in the United States. She is also Associate Director of the Luxembourg Income Study, a cross-national research institute and data archive, located in Luxembourg. She is co-author of Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), a comparative study of work-family reconciliation policies in 12 countries.

Alexandra Heron

Alexandra Heron has worked on labor law issues for trade unions and in government in Britain and Australia. She is currently based in France and works on international comparisons of discrimination law and working time. Her work has included consultancies for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on labor market issues, and for the United Kingdom Equal Opportunities Commission on pregnancy discrimination.