Transformation and governance

This chapter uses the example of part-time work in the UK in order to investigate the transformative nature of EU governance. In line with the other country analyses, we focus on three regulatory sources: EU gender equality law, the 1997 Part-time Work Framework Agreement and Directive (hereafter Part-time Directive) and Title VIII EC Treaty dealing with employment policy.

Given the production at EU level of these regulatory sources concerning part-time work, and the special, well-known, characteristics of the EU as a legal and political entity, rather than focussing on whether EU governance can be transformative, we consider how, and under what circumstances, it can transform a given policy area. Therefore, our interest does not primarily lie in measuring outcomes by, for instance, enquiring whether the lot of part-time workers in the UK has been improved as a result of EU intervention. It lies instead in analysing the distinctive spaces created by various modes of governance with regard to the regulatory and social profile of part-time work in the UK. Of course, these two issues – processes and outcomes – cannot be neatly separated since one important measure of transformative capacity is the magnitude of the change provoked, or influence brought to bear, by a given EU intervention. Notwithstanding that, it remains important to note that we are interested in outcomes from a perspective which is principally interested in the processes of transformation.

Introduction

In this chapter, we advance some suggestions towards a general assessment of the significance which EU law and policy have had and are having in the regulation of part-time work in the Member States whose experience is recounted and analysed in other chapters of this work. Our starting point is that, in those Members States, there has occurred, since the early 1980s, a process which we can identify as the de-marginalisation of part-time work. That is to say, part-time work has moved from the outer edges of employment policy and practice towards the central area of the labour market. Our inquiry is to understand what impact EU regulation has had and is having on that process.

We concentrate on EU measures or interventions specifically directed to part-time work, particularly the Part-time Work Directive of 1997, but also the part-time work element in the EU Employment Guidelines. However, those measures or interventions have to be seen in the context of a larger set of measures and interventions which bear upon or regulate part-time work, at both national and supranational levels. For example, specific measures or interventions cannot be seen in isolation from more general ones designed to stimulate employment and combat social exclusion, to regulate basic labour standards, or to control gender discrimination in employment. Nevertheless it is useful to single out measures and interventions which are specific to part-time work for a case-study of interaction between EU regulation and member state regulation.