Rethinking Workplace Regulation: Beyond the Standard Contract of Employment

Appendix: The Decline in the Standard Employment Contract: A Review of the Evidence

366 Appendix The Decline in the Standard Employment Contract: A Review of the Evidence katherine v.w. stone T his volume is premised on the proposition that labor markets in advanced industrialized countries have changed profoundly over the past three decades. We refer to this change as the decline of the standard contract of employment—using that term to describe a social practice that was widespread, if not paradigmatic, in most advanced economies . The essence of the standard contract of employment was the longterm employment of an employee by a single employer over a working life. The origin of that practice, its content and its implications, are described in more detail in chapters 1 through 4 of this volume. Several other chapters present data relating to changes in labor market practices in specific countries. This appendix presents comparative data from a number of countries where the standard employment contract was once dominant but has now declined. It addresses three of its specific features: the growth of nonstandard employment, the decline in job tenure, and the decline in union density and collective bargaining coverage. I use standard published data sources such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, and Jelle Visser’s comprehensive dataset on union density and collective bargaining.1 I also include comparative data on income inequality. The latter trend may or may not be causally related to the decline in the standard contract of employment, but it certainly correlates closely with it. Overall, the data confirm the changes in national labor markets described in previous chapters, and in particular show an increase in many forms of nonstandard employment in Europe, Japan, and Australia. In Appendix 367 the United States, the trajectory concerning nonstandard employment is less clearly demonstrated, due to definitional issues that will be discussed . Nonetheless, the U.S. data reveal an increase in nonstandard employment among mid-career and older workers. The data also show that while there has been no overall decline in job tenure in the United States, there has been a decline in the job tenure of mid-career males, the group that personified the paradigm of the standard contract of employment in the past. In Europe, there has been a decline in some countries but not in others; however, there too, mid-career male workers have experienced a significant decline in job tenure. The data also show a marked pattern of decline in union density and collective bargaining coverage in all the countries studied. growth of nonstandard employment One development that testifies to the decline in the standard model of employment is the increasing presence of workers with nonstandard employment relationships. There are many types of nonstandard employment relationships, and the terminology used to describe them varies from country to country. Among the more common descriptors are: fixed-term employment contracts, temporary work, in-house temps, dispatched employees, temporary agency workers, leased employees, short-term contracts, project work, on-call work, zero-time work, parttime work, training contracts, mini-jobs, semi-autonomous workers, and quasi-independent contractors. Some forms of nonstandard employment are unique to particular countries. For example, the German “minijob ” does not have an obvious analog in other countries (see chapter 7, this volume), nor does the Japanese category of “arbeiter” (see chapter 14). Moreover, for many types of nonstandard employment, data simply do not exist. While differences in actual employment arrangements, in terminology, and in the availability of information make inter-country comparisons difficult, harmonized data from the OECD strongly suggest that nonstandard employment in most industrialized countries has grown significantly over the past two decades. In the following subsections, I discuss trends in three of the most prevalent forms of nonstandard employment—temporary employment, temporary agency employment, and part-time employment. There are some overlaps between these categories, but they are analytically, and often empirically, distinct. Temporary Employment As with nonstandard work in general, there are many types of temporary work—including fixed-term contracts, on-call work, zero-time 368 Appendix work, day labor, and replacement work. Also, as with nonstandard work in general, some forms of temporary work are unique to specific countries (see OECD 2002). However, one type of nonstandard employment relationship that has been studied and measured in many countries is employment formally defined as limited in duration, in...