The first part-time economy in the world. Does it work?

_*This paper is republished from the first edition in 2000.*_ h2. Introduction In his Adam Smith lecture of the European Association of Labour Economists, Harvard economist Richard Freeman has defined the Netherlands as ‘the only part-time economy of the world, with a finger in the dike of unemployment’ (Freeman 1998: 2). How did it happen? What kind of jobs are these and whose jobs are they? Can a ‘one-and-a-half job’ model work? Is it a solution to Europe’s predicament of unemployment? These are the questions that I will try to answer in this paper. The paper begins with a brief description of the main changes in the Dutch labour market during the past decades. It shows that there was a major reversal of trends on nearly all performance indicators in the early 1 980s. Next, I discuss the role of wage moderation, sectoral change and job redistribution. In section three I shall focus in particular on the role of atypical and part-time employment. Section four concentrates on policies and changes in labour market behaviour and preferences, in particular of (married) women, trade unions, employers and governments. In the concluding part I shall identify some problems associated with the one-and-a-half job model and try to answer the central evaluative questions and title of the paper.