Sustainability Seminar - Atypical Employment And Its Implications

“Part-time employment”, “great recession”, “EU enlargements”, “sharing economy”, and “the rise of the new precariat” - these issues constitute only a few examples of pressing issues causing vivid discussions about the recent developments in labour markets. In this session, Daniel Borowczyk-Martins (Dep. of Economics, CBS), Janine Leschke (Dep. of Business and Politics, CBS), and Attila Marton (Dep. of Digitalization, CBS) will take a critical look at some of these disruptions, the development of atypical employment and its implications.

During times of economic crisis, the share of workers employed part-time increases substantially. But how should this phenomenon be interpreted? According to Daniel Borowczyk-Martins (Dep. of Economics, CBS), one common assumption is that part-time jobs are more prevalent in sectors that are less sensitive to the business cycle, so that recessionary changes in the sectoral composition of employment explain the increase in part-time employment. However, as Daniel will explain, this hypothesis only accounts for a small part of the story. Instead, the growth of part-time work operates mainly through reductions in working hours in existing jobs.

Link to research: https://wol.iza.org/articles/why-does-part-time-employment-increase-in-recessions/long

Janine Leschke (Dep. of Business and Politics, CBS) will talk about the effects of the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007, which made citizens from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) legally equal EU labour market participants. However, CEE immigrants still face ‘racialisation’ and segmentation in North-Western Europe in terms of labour market integration. Similar processes might extend to EU-South migrants, giving rise to a division of labour, whereby CEE and EU-South migrants find poor-quality, low-pay jobs as compared to nationals but also EU-West/EEA immigrants in the North-Western EU labour markets. Indeed, Janine’s’ research suggest that inequalities across the EU are being reproduced rather than converging.

Link to research: http://style-handbook.eu/  (See section “Migration and Mobility" for Janine's work)

Attila Marton (Dep. of Digitalization, CBS) will discuss with us how frequently hyped sharing economy platforms (SEPs) utilize digital technologies to purposefully blur established organizational boundaries and categories. Most prominently, they blur the notion of employment and labour by facilitating the “casual participation” of private individuals as “users” of their services. Therefore, SEPs can gain significant advantages over well-established incumbents as they disrupt mature markets and labour structures as well as challenge long-held wisdoms of how to organize the creation of value.

Link to research: http://misqe.org/ojs2/index.php/misqe/article/view/798

Just like our previous seminars, the session will take place at Dalgas Have 15, Frederiksberg. The room number is DH 2V.071, i.e. on the 2nd floor in the west wing of the building. Please let me know whether you plan to participate in this session by replying to this email before the 15th of March. 

Keep in mind that in order to ensure a good level of audience participation and dialogue, we aim to keep the participant number per session at a maximum of 40, of which 20 seats for researchers to create a balance with practitioners, i.e. first come, first served.