Living hours under pressure: flexibility loopholes in the Danish IR-model

Pages888-902
Date02 October 2017
Published date02 October 2017
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/ER-03-2017-0049
AuthorAnna Ilsøe,Trine Pernille Larsen,Jonas Felbo-Kolding
Subject MatterHR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law
INTERNATIONAL
Living hours under pressure:
flexibility loopholes in the Danish
IR-model
Anna Ilsøe, Trine Pernille Larsen and Jonas Felbo-Kolding
Employment Relations Research Centre, Department of Sociology,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of part-time work on absolute wages. The
empirical focus is wages and working hours in three selected sectors within private services in the Danish
labour market industrial cleaning, retail, hotels and restaurants and their agreement-based regulation of
working time and wages. Theoretically, this analysis is inspired by the concept of living hours, which
addresses the interaction between working hours and living wages, but adds a new layer to the concept in
that the authors also consider the importance of working time regulations for securing a living wage.
Design/methodology/approach The paper builds on desk research of collective agreements and
analysis of monthly administrative register data on wages and working hours of Danish employees from the
period 2008-2014.
Findings This analysis shows that the de facto hourly wages have increased since the global financial
crisis in all three sectors. This is in accordance with increasing minimum wage levels in the sector-level
agreements. The majority of workers in all three sectors work part-time. Marginal part-timers 15 hours or
less per week make up the largest group of workers. The de facto hourly wage for part-timers, including
marginal part-timers, is relatively close to the sector average. However, the yearly job-related income is much
lower for part-time than for full-time workers and much lower than the poverty threshold. Whereas the
collective agreement in industrial cleaning includes a minimum floor of 15 weekly working hours this is not
the case in retail, hotels and restaurants. This creates a loophole in the latter two sectors that can be exploited
by employers to gain wage flexibility through part-time work.
Originality/value The living wage literature usually focusses on hourly wages (including minimum
wages via collective agreements or legislation). This analysis demonstrates that studies of low-wage work
must include the number of working hours and working time regulations, as this aspect can have a dramatic
influence on absolute wages even in cases of hourly wages at relatively high levels. Part-time work and
especially marginal part-time work can be associated with very low yearly income levels even in cases like
Denmark if regulations do not include minimum working time floors. The authors suggest that future
studies include the perspective of living hours to draw attention to the effect of low number of weekly hours
on absolute income levels.
Keywords Living hours, Low-wage workers, Private services, The Danish IR-model, Working time regulation
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The scholarly debate around living wages and minimum wages have regained momentum in
the last few decades as western economies have witnessed a rapid growth in low-wage work,
earnings inequalities, in-work poverty and contracts other than full-time employment,
particularly in private services (Garnero et al., 2014; Parker et al., 2016). However, much of the
literature focusses on Anglo-Saxon countries primarily the UK and the USA, where the living
Employee Relations
Vol. 39 No. 6, 2017
pp. 888-902
Emerald Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-03-2017-0049
Received 1 March 2017
Revised 1 July 2017
13 July 2017
Accepted 19 July 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
© Anna Ilsøe, Trine Pernille Larsen and Jonas Felbo-Kolding. Published by Emerald Publishing
Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone
may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article ( for both commercial
and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors.
The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
888
ER
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