Special Job-sharing regulation - a Promoter of Flexible Working?

• Author: Agne Kalson
• Pages: 85-93

85

JURIDICA INTERNATIONAL 26/2017

Agne Kalson

Doctoral student

University of Tartu

Special Job-sharing

Regulation – a Promoter

of Flexible Working?

1. Introduction

Economic-demographic changes taking place in the European Union (EU) present a challenge to standard

full-time employment. With regard to contemporary employment relationships, standard full-time employ-

ment may not be enough to meet everybody’s needs in the labour market. Various needs have led to diverse

new ways to organise work, including working time, and these represent a growing trend in the EU. Since

2000, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) has

detected nine new forms of employment in the EU.*1 Job-sharing is one of the new forms of work listed in

the Eurofound report.

Job-sharing (working in pairs or work that involves ‘twinning’) was introduced f‌i rst in the United States

of America (USA) in the ’60s and was characterised mainly through f‌l exibility in the organisation of work-

ing time, with ‘two people sharing the same employment relationship corresponding to one full-time job’.*2

Teaching and nursing were among the f‌i rst professional positions to be shared thus, f‌i lled largely by women

wishing to combine a career and family life.*3

Benef‌i ts of‌f ered by job-sharing caused this alternative employment form to spread from the USA to

Europe. In Europe, the concept of job-sharing was introduced initially during reces sionary times in the

1980s and the early 1990s. In those times, Europe faced a tremendous increase in unemployment rates. As

a remedy, work-sharing was proposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

(OECD) Europe. The forms of work-sharing used thus far have been job-sharing (f‌i lling a single work post

with more than one person) and ‘trading hours for jobs’ (reducing working time for workers under contract,

to create jobs).*4

Nowadays, job-sharing is distinguished from work-sharing in that the latter is a more generic concept

applied for any steps taken to redistribute work in order to reduce unemployment*5 and usually refers to an

 Eurofound. New forms of employment, pp. –. Available at https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/sites/default/f‌i les/ef_pub-

lication/f‌i eld_ef_document/efen.pdf (most recently accessed on ..).

 S. Isola. Il contratto di job sharing [‘The job-sharing contract’], p. . Available at http://www.tosc.cgil.it/ftp/centrodocu-

mentazione/f‌i les/tesi_isola.pdf (most recently accessed on ..) (in Italian).

 K. Marshall. Job sharing, p. . Available at http://ivt.crepuq.qc.ca/popactive/documentation_A//

pearsa.pdf (most recently accessed on ..).

 T. Miyakoshi. The e cacy of job-sharing policy. – Applied Economics Letters  () / , pp. –. – DOI: http://

dx.doi.org/./.

 J.G. Pesek, C. McGee. An analysis of job sharing, full-time and part-time work arrangements: One hospital’s experience. –

American Business Review  () / , pp. –.

https://doi.org/10.12697/JI.2017.26.09