Involuntary part-time, data from the Inequalities and Diversity Forum report

The involuntary part-time does not have a legal definition, but involves more than half of part-time workers: people who would have liked to work full-time, but found themselves forced to accept part-time to lack of alternatives. «It wasn't a choice, I didn't choose part-time. I stumbled upon a part-time job». This is one of the five women interviewed in the Report Inequality and Diversity Forum From conciliation to constraint: part-time in Italy is not a choice. Proposals for gender equity and quality of work, presented to the Senate. «I had asked for a full-time job, but it wasn't given to me. “You're lucky to have 4 hours,” they tell me. Two hours of work a dayincluding the lunch break, are a joke”, says another.

A widespread phenomenon

There were five of them who shared their experience, but in Italy there are more 2 million male and female workers (out of 4 million) in this situation. «I requested, but not only me, to be moved to full-time in this company, because in any case the contract is part-time but in reality you work full-time, I worked a lot of overtime so the so-called additional work that was not paid as additional. The request always came at the last minute, without planning and I tended to always accept because I felt like I was being blackmailed» says a third woman.

The other situations that the report took into consideration, together with the refusal of full-time work: when a worker is hired on a part-time basis but receives a higher pay through overtime hours or thanks to «elastic clauses» introduced by the Jobs Act, which specifically provide for increasing the number of hours compared to the established one; or when you work more and the extra hours are paid out of your paycheck (if paid).

In certain situations, part-time work could be initially preferred precisely to meet family needs, but, the report specifies, then “theinability to convert part-time into full-time determines its involuntariness.” And the phenomenon strikes, in proportion, women more.

A marginalization of women's work

Based on the data collected in the report, in fact, of the total number of employed women workers, the 16.5% is in an involuntary part-time situation, against the 5.6% of men. An instrument whose main purpose would be to guarantee a greater balance between private life and work, without being to the detriment of employment, in Italy «very often it is the involuntary outcome of a marginalization of work which it especially affects women».

In general, the short-time formula is the “preferred” form of entry into work when hiring women: in 3 out of 5 companies, part-time workers are almost exclusively or exclusively women. This in a country where the gap between female and male employment is already almost twenty percentage points: according to ISTAT data for 2022, women employed between the ages of 20 and 64 are 55 percent, men 74.7 percent. With a difference between women without children and those who have children under six years of age, penalized compared to the former.

Based on the latest Gender Equality Indexwhich assigns a score from 1 to 100 to the Member States of the European Union based on seven areas (work, health, money, power, time, violence, knowledge) in which to achieve full gender equality, Italy ranks 13th (out of 27), with a score of 68.2. The European average is 70.2.

Since 2010, Italy has seen growth especially in terms of health, power and time, but as to the single work data it qualifies last among the Stateswith a score of 65. For comparison, the Spainwhich according to the Forum's report has experienced a surge similar to the Italian one in the increase in involuntary part-time, except for a change in the trend in 2017, in the Gender Equality Index it has totaled ten points more than Italy in the work sector.

The other involuntary part-time workers

Not only does it mostly affect women, but the data collected has highlighted how involuntary part-time work is mostly found in fixed-term contracts (23 percent), more than in those with permanent contracts (9 percent).

Furthermore, it is more frequent in the South, among foreigners and among those with low educational qualifications: «I wanted to go to university but I had a somewhat critical family situation I immediately started working to help out at home. At the beginning I did sick substitutions and stayed 6-7 hours, with the promise of being hired. I held out and they hired me at 17 and a half hours, giving me a fixed contract, with the promise that the hours would increase, which after six years it hasn't happened», says one of the interviewees in the report. She continues: «Without working overtime I won't reach 600 euros a month». The paradox highlighted by the stories is that even those who request part-time work to reconcile private life and work find themselves having to look for more jobs to be able to support themselves.

In Europe

In any case, compared to the European average of part-time workers, which corresponds to the Italian one, those who find themselves with an involuntary part-time contract in the Union, however, they are a quarter of the totalcompared to one in two Italians: this confirms, according to the report, how «the use of part-time work in Italy is linked more to business strategies than to individuals' needs for work-life balance”.

Businesses

As for the employers who choose to include part-time in a structural way (i.e. in companies where it concerns more than 70 percent of employees), they are more likely to be operators in the macro sector “other services” or that of tourism and commerce. And it would be about microenterprises (with less than 5 employees) or very large companies (with more than 250 employees). In these companies with structural part-time work, the study highlights, there is “a low propensity to use flexibility tools to support workers, as well as to introduce actions to encourage agile working”, and they are often trade union representatives absent.

Suggestions for improvement

According to the report, there are three directions in which to move to reverse the trend. On the bargaining front, for example, it could associate short-time working hours with a permanent contractor improve the tools to protect workers, defining the minimum number of hours or monitoring the use of elastic clauses. Then, the proposal is to increase controls on these contracts, inserting a complaint system which workers can resort to, and discourage the choice of involuntary part-time, using more inspectors, in line with European recommendations.