Part-time work: the co-production of a contested employment model for women in Austria and internationally, 1950s to 1980s

Abstract

In 2022, every second employed woman in Austria worked part-time, while only 12.6 percent of men did so. In more affluent countries, part-time work has evolved from a special form of employment to a gendered norm in the past six decades, whereas in state-socialist and post-state-socialist Europe, this model of women’s employment played a much less pronounced role historically. Albeit contested, part-time work has been a concern of women trade unionists since the 1950s. This article examines the emergence and evolution of an important trend in the history of women’s work from a multi-level perspective. It explores how women activists in the ICFTU, the ILO and in Austria dealt with part-time work as a method of harmonizing women’s unpaid and paid work. Collaboration with the ILO played an important role in Austrian developments, and Austrian activists aimed to impact on international decision-making. Furthermore, the article shows the rather hidden role women civil servants played in generating knowledge on the topic. This analysis of the evolution of the gendered norm of part-time work and its contestation contributes to recent research on shifts in reproductive arrangements and gender relations in the second half of the twentieth century.

Italian women workers and women activists between home and factory: the struggle against labour precarity (1950s–1970s)

“…When the public debate on part-time employment started in Italy, part-time work had already become widespread in various European countries, as well as in North America during the golden age, and was discussed at the international level in the postwar period. Since the 1950s, the International Labour Organization had promoted surveys and studies, while international trade union organisations took different positions regarding part-time work between the 1950s and the 1970s, as recent studies show (Helfert 2023;Boris 2019).…”