is part-time work a good or bad opportunity for people with disabilities? a european analysis
TRANSCRIPT
RESEARCH PAPER
Is part-time work a good or bad opportunity for people with disabilities?A European analysis
RICARDO PAGAN
Departamento de Economıa Aplicada (Estructura Economica), University of Malaga, Spain
Accepted December 2006
AbstractPurpose. The purpose of this article is to analyse the incidence of part-time employment among people with disabilitieswithin a European context. Particular attention is paid to the type of part-time employment (voluntary vs. involuntary) andthe levels of job satisfaction that people with disabilities report.Method. Using data from the European Community Household Panel for the period 1995 – 2001, we estimate part-timerates, preferences and levels of job satisfaction for people with and without disabilities for 13 European countries.Results. The results show that a higher number of people with disabilities work part-time, compared to non-disabledworkers. This is mainly due to disabled part-time workers having a much higher preference for part-time working than peoplewithout disability. This finding is corroborated when we analyse the levels of job satisfaction for disabled part-time workers.Conclusions. Part-time employment becomes a relevant instrument for policy makers and employers to improve the socialinclusion, income and labour conditions of the people with disabilities because it allows these people to achieve a muchbetter balance between their personal and health needs and working life.
Keywords: Part-time, disability, Europe
Introduction
In recent years, there has been increasing interest
within the European Union (EU), member states
and non-governmental organizations regarding the
social and labour integration of people with dis-
abilities. Despite the establishment of rules and
regulations to support equal opportunities and the
integration of disabled people into the workplace,
employment levels among people with disabilities are
still much lower than among non-disabled people,
whereas their inactivity rates are very high [1,2]. In
this sense, the evidence suggests that employer
activity in this regard is still minimal and policy
makers are not working together to ensure that there
are opportunities for this population to succeed [3].
The aim of this study is to analyse the incidence of
part-time employment among people with disabil-
ities within a European context. We are particularly
interested in analysing the preferences of disabled
people for this type of non-standard employment and
the levels of job satisfaction they report. This analysis
is especially relevant due to the increase in part-time
employment in European labour markets in the last
two decades. This expansion of part-time employ-
ment has been considered in certain countries as a
solution or, at least, a partial solution, to combat the
high levels of unemployment [4]. As result, many
labour reforms have been carried out within the
European Union in order to provide a major impulse
and dynamism to such non-standard employment.
Part-time employment provides the companies with
flexibility and allows the individuals to achieve some
balance between their working life and other types of
activities (e.g., family, education or leisure). In
contrast, there are a large number of empirical works
that have pointed out that part-time employment is
associated with lower hourly wages, fewer non-wage
subsidies, higher labour instability and turnover and
less promotion and training opportunities [5 – 9].
Despite these drawbacks, part-time work might
become a tool to integrate disabled people into the
labour market, and to change their inactivity rates.
Following Robinson [10], the opportunity to work
Correspondence: Ricardo Pagan-Rodrıguez, Departamento de Economıa Aplicada (Estructura Economica), University of Malaga, Plaza de El Ejido s/n, 29.071
Malaga, Spain. Tel: þ34 952 131186. Fax: þ34 952 132075. E-mail: [email protected]
Disability and Rehabilitation, December 2007; 29(24): 1910 – 1919
ISSN 0963-8288 print/ISSN 1464-5165 online ª 2007 Informa UK Ltd.
DOI: 10.1080/09638280701192881
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part-time flexible hours is important for people with
disabilities, especially where people are easily tired or
have considerable pain to cope with. Thus, part-time
jobs may provide flexibility to people with disabilities
that accommodates health problems and other
personal concerns [11].
This paper is organized as follows: The next
section contains a brief review of the existing
literature on disability and part-time work. Section
3 defines the concept of disability and part-time work
used in this work as well as the data employed in the
analysis done later. Section 4 includes the results
obtained and the last section presents the main
conclusions and offers some recommendations
regarding economic policy.
Previous research
Currently, there is an abundant and extensive
literature on part-time employment [8,9,12,13] as
well as an increasing number of works that analyse
the disability phenomenon and its effect on, for
example, labour participation [14,15], wages [16 –
18], the (dis)incentives to work associated with
different social benefits programs [19], or the use
of disability pensions as an instrument for leaving the
labour market definitively [20]. However, the works
that investigate the relationship between disability
and part-time employment are very scarce and
always focus on the situation in the USA. In this
sense, our study of the incidence of part-time
employment among people with disabilities for a
set of European countries is totally novel and fills an
important gap in the existing literature.
In the context of such scarce research on part-time
work and disability, the work of Schur is worth
mentioning [21]. Using data from the Current
Population Survey (1995 – 2001) and the Survey of
Income and Program Participation (1997) for the
USA, Schur underlines the fact that non-standard
jobs (i.e., part-time work, temporary employment
and independent contracting) are especially attrac-
tive and are the best employment option for many
people with disabilities who have health problems
that make standard full-time work difficult. For
example, 29.8% of workers with disabilities are
working part-time, compared with 13% of workers
without disabilities. However, these disabled part-
time workers receive lower pay and fewer benefits
due both to the types of jobs they hold (mainly
concentrated in lower-paying occupations) and dis-
ability gaps within job types. In a later work and
using the same data source, Schur concludes that
people with disabilities are more likely to take part-
time jobs as labour markets are tightened and
employers increasingly cater to workers’ needs and
preferences [11]. This finding supports the idea that
it is not discrimination as such, but the way in which
these jobs can accommodate health concerns that
primarily explains the high rates of part-time work
among people with disabilities.
Recently, Hotchkiss has pointed out, using data
from the Current Population Survey for the USA in
the period 1984 – 2000, the dramatic increase in the
last 20 years in voluntary part-time employment
among disabled workers relative to non-disabled
workers (from 27% in 1984 to 33% in 2000) [22].
Two explanations are offered by this author. First,
part-time jobs may have become more attractive
through the accommodations employers (in line with
the Americans with Disabilities Act [ADA]) have
made in allowing disabled workers to work part-time
that would only be available on a full-time basis for
non-disabled workers. Second, policy changes over
time have contributed to making part-time jobs more
financially, rather than more qualitatively, attractive
(e.g., extension of health insurance coverage for part-
timers).
Data
The microdata used in this study are taken from the
European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for
the period 1995 – 2001. The ECHP is an annual
household panel survey promoted by EUROSTAT
and comprises a large set of questions addressed to
all the countries that form the sample. The direct
comparability across countries offers considerable
advantages over the use of individual country
databases, where there may be considerable variation
in the type, level and coding of information available.
Apart from questions concerning individual and
household characteristics, the questionnaire of this
anonymous survey includes questions on employ-
ment, income, education, the individual’s health
status as well the number of hours worked a week
and the main reasons for working part-time, among
others.
From the health section of the questionnaire, it is
possible to construct a measure of disability on the
basis of the following question: ‘Do you have any
chronic, physical or mental health problem, illness or
disability?’. If the person answers ‘Yes’ to this
question, the follow-up question, ‘Are you hampered
in your daily activities by this chronic or mental
health problem, illness or disability?’, allows us to
know the grade of severity of the disability. There-
fore, we can distinguish three possible situations: (a)
those reporting they are limited severely in their daily
activities; (b) those who are limited to some extent;
and (c) those who report such a condition but which
does not limit them in their daily activities. Following
the work of Gannon, we include the latter in the
disability definition because in the survey although a
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person may respond as not being limited in their
daily activities, without adaptations being made in
his/her workplace it is possible that this person
should be classified as severely limited [23]. In many
European countries the employers are obliged by law
to make all the possible modifications and adaptation
of the workplace in order to get that any person with
disability may perform correctly and properly his/her
job. This definition has already been used in other
empirical studies such as Gannon [23] and Jones
et al. [24].
To identify a person as working part-time, we use
a measure of part-time status based on the self-
assessment of the workers. The weekly hours
worked are referred to the main job or activity.
The ECHP defines a part-time worker as a person
who reports that he/she is working less than 30 h
per week; and a full-time worker as someone
working 30 h or more per week or less if the person
considers that his/her job is full-time work. Namely,
despite adopting a 30-h threshold for defining part-
time work, the final assignation of each worker is
subject to his/her own evaluation on the type of
working time that he/she has. Therefore, this
definition allows us to control for the existence of
variations in hours of work throughout occupations
and industries in each country. Although this
measure differs from other definitions of part-time
work (e.g., the International Labour Organization
(ILO) defines a part-time worker as ‘an employed
person whose hours of work are less than those
of comparable full-time workers’), the ranking of
countries is not very sensitive to the choice of
definition; namely, countries with relatively high
levels of part-time work according to one definition
tend to have relatively high levels of part-time
working according to another [25].
The sample consists of working-age individuals
(males and females), with ages ranging from 15 – 64,
from 13 European countries (Denmark, The
Netherlands, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy,
Greece, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Germany
and the UK) during the period 1995 – 2001. The
ECHP only has data for Finland during the period
1996 – 2001. Luxembourg and Sweden were ex-
cluded due to the lack of information on key
variables and sample size problems. Although data
for 1994 are also available they have been excluded
because the questions on disability changed slightly
in 1995. After dropping those individuals for which
we do not have full information on the key variables
during the period 1995 – 2001, the total number of
observations is 688,098 for these 13 European
countries (351,634 males and 336,464 females). It
should be noted that all the results shown in the next
section have been obtained by using the sample
weights available in the ECHP in order to reflect
population characteristics and correct the possible
lack of representativity of the sample.
Results
According to Figure 1, part-time employment (as a
percentage of total employment) is higher for
people with disabilities than for people without
disabilities for almost all of the countries for which
data are available. In addition, the incidence of
part-time employment among disabled people
differs significantly across the European countries
analysed. For the female sample, the countries with
the highest levels of part-time employment among
people with disabilities are The Netherlands
(57.29%), Ireland (45.27%) and the UK
(43.51%), whereas the lowest levels are found in
Finland (14.03%), Italy (16.92%) and Greece
(17.16%). For males, the incidence of part-time
employment for disabled people is lower than that
for females, with Ireland and The Netherlands
again in the first places of the ranking (15.17 and
15%, respectively), and France (4.74%) and Austria
(4.97%) in the lowest ones.
If we compare the levels of part-time employment
between disabled and non-disabled people, we find
that the highest differentials for the female sample are
found in Ireland, Portugal and Belgium. For
instance, in Portugal the levels of part-time employ-
ment among disabled females are more than twice
those registered by non-disabled females (22.42
compared to 9.72). For the male sample, the
differential in part-time employment rates seems to
be very significant for certain European countries. In
countries such as Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Austria
the use of part-time employment among disabled
males is much more frequent than that for non-
disabled people. Once again, the part-time employ-
ment rates for disabled people in Portugal are five
times higher than those for non-disabled males. In
this sense, we can suggest that part-time employment
for males in these countries has played an important
role in helping people with disabilities to enter and
remain in the labour markets.
Figure 2 presents the levels of part-time employ-
ment according to the level of limitation or restric-
tion of people with disabilities (i.e., severe, some and
no limitation). We have to bear in mind that the
sample available for people with disabilities with
severe limitation is somewhat reduced for some
European countries. Despite this fact, the differen-
tiated analysis of each sub-group is relevant due to
they have different levels of participation in the
labour market [23]. The results allow us to identify a
clear relationship between the level of limitation and
the incidence of part-time employment. Namely,
those disabled people with severe limitations are
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more likely to have part-time employment compared
to those with some or no limitation. A severe
limitation can reduce the total quantity of time that
a person with disabilities has available to work in the
labour market due to needing more time for daily
individual activities such as personal and health care,
transport, assistance or rehabilitation, among others.
In this sense, Oi points out that one of the main
characteristics of disability is that it ‘steals’ time from
individuals (e.g., hours of work) and especially if this
Figure 1. Part-time employment as a percentage of total employment. Period 1995 – 2001. Source: European Community Household Panel
1995 – 2001. Note: Individuals aged 15 – 64. Weighted data.
Is part-time work a good or bad opportunity for people with disabilities? 1913
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is more severe or intense [26]. These results are
found in all countries for both sexes, except for the
case of Irish females where the opposite result is
obtained. This finding is consistent with that
obtained by Schur for the USA [11]. The differences
in the part-time employment rates between each sub-
group of disabled people are especially considerable
in Belgium, Portugal and Denmark for the female
sample, and Ireland, The Netherlands and Portugal
for the male sample. In contrast, in countries such as
Italy and Germany these differences are less evident
among disabled females, as well for Finnish males.
Figure 2. Part-time employment as a percentage of the total employment for people with disabilities by level of limitation or restriction.
Period 1995 – 2001. Source: European Community Household Panel 1995 – 2001. Note: Individuals aged 15 – 64. Weighted data.
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From these results, the following question may
arise: to what extent would people with disabilities
working part-time prefer to work full-time? Are these
individuals voluntarily working part-time? As the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and De-
velopment (OECD) mentions, one of the distin-
guishing features of part-time employment, as
opposed to other forms of non-standard employ-
ment, such as shift-working, is the strongly favour-
able attitude of many employees toward it [8]. Is this
the case of people with disabilities across Europe? To
look at this issue, we use the following question
included in the ECHP: ‘Main reason for working less
than full-time in the main job?’. The respondent may
choose among different alternatives which vary from
education or housework to the inability to find a full-
time job. As in other studies, we define involuntary
part-time workers as those working part-time but the
respondents’ reply to the previous question is that
they could not find a full-time job. The usual
interpretation in the existing literature of involuntary
part-time employment is that it is a demand-side
phenomenon where the part-time workers have
preferences similar to those of full-time workers but
are constrained regarding their hours of work. Thus,
involuntary part-time work can be considered a
form of hidden unemployment or underemployment
[27 – 29].
The magnitude of involuntary part-time employ-
ment among people with and without disabilities
for the European countries analysed is shown in
Figure 3. In most of these countries people with
disabilities have lower levels of involuntary part-time
employment compared to people without disabilities.
The differential in involuntary part-time employment
in favour of non-disabled people is especially higher
for males working part-time in Greece and Italy
(25.18 and 22.91 percentage points, respectively),
whereas for females this is found in Portugal and Italy
(13.26 and 7.94 percentage points, respectively).
These results suggest that part-time employment for
disabled workers often reflects their preferences for
fewer working hours per week. This finding is of great
interest and importance, especially for policy makers,
because part-time employment can become a useful
instrument to improve the employment prospects of
people with disabilities, particularly in those countries
where the levels of employment for this group are very
low. In this sense, public policies that promote the
availability of part-time jobs or make them more
attractive for employers and employees (e.g., redu-
cing wage inequalities between part- and full-time
jobs or facilitating equal access to formation, training
or non-wage subsidies) may be very effective to
increase employment rates and reduce the levels of
poverty, social exclusion and discrimination against
people with disabilities.
Looking at Figure 1 and 3, we can see that the
higher the levels of part-time employment in a
country, the smaller the apparent incidence of
involuntary part-time employment in that country.
For instance, in the case of The Netherlands, the
proportion of females working part-time is the
highest, whereas the proportion of females reporting
they could not find full-time work is very low (this
happens for disabled and non-disabled workers). On
the other hand, in Greece, where the proportion of
females working part-time is around 10% and 16%
for non-disabled and disabled workers, respectively,
the magnitude of involuntary part-time work reaches
34% for both groups. To test this negative relation-
ship between these two variables, we have calculated
the correlation coefficients. For disabled workers, the
correlation coefficients are almost equal, 70.65 and
70.63 for males and females, respectively. The
correlation coefficient for disabled males has been
calculated by excluding Ireland due to it could be
considered as a special case, i.e., with high levels of
part-time employment (15.17%) and high propor-
tion of involuntary part-time employment (40.6%).
If we include Ireland in our calculations, the
correlation coefficient drastically falls to 0.01. These
results are consistent with those obtained in other
international works for the total working-age popula-
tion [8]. However, for non-disabled workers the
correlation coefficients for males and females are
very different, 70.77 and 70.48, respectively. Most
of these differences are related to the role that
part-time employment plays for disabled and non-
disabled workers. According to the work of
Buddelmeyer et al., for 11 European countries, some
evidence exists regarding part-time employment as a
stepping-stone state from inactivity into full-time
employment, but the proportion of individuals
affected is very low (less than 5%) and the rates of
transition between these two labour statuses vary
significantly among countries [13]. In addition, these
authors conclude that an important number of
workers remain within part-time jobs and that part-
time jobs are more likely to promote labour market
entry rather than facilitate labour market exit. This is
what could be happening to disabled workers in our
analysis; namely, part-time employment could re-
present for these people an appropriate and efficient
form of work that facilitates their labour market entry
and exit from labour inactivity. Therefore, part-time
employment would become a mostly non-transi-
tional labour status into full-time employment and
freely chosen by disabled workers who prefer work-
ing shorter hours. As other studies have noted,
employment for disabled people is one of the best
guarantees to combat poverty and social exclusion, in
spite of the inferior labour conditions associated with
part-time jobs.
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A further element we can use to corroborate these
findings is to analyse the impact of part-time
employment on the levels of job satisfaction of
people with disabilities and compare it with that of
people without disabilities. The ECHP questionnaire
provides answers on the individuals’ levels of
satisfaction regarding some aspects of their lives,
their levels of job satisfaction among them. The
question we use in this work is the following: ‘How
satisfied are you with your work or main activity’?
The respondents can choose among six possible
alternatives, ranging from ‘not satisfied’ (¼ 1) to
‘fully satisfied’ (¼ 6). Thus, job satisfaction level is
based on the individual’s own evaluation. Table I
Figure 3. Involuntary part-time employment as a percentage of the total part-time employment. Period 1995 – 2001. Source: European
Community Household Panel 1995 – 2001. Note: Individuals aged 15 – 64. Weighted data. For Germany and the UK data are only available
for the period 1995 – 1996.
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shows the average levels of job satisfaction for
disabled and non-disabled workers by country and
hours worked. On average, people with disabilities
working full-time report lower levels of job satisfac-
tion in all countries as compared to people without
disabilities working full-time. According to the
equality of means t-statistic, all differences are
significant at 5% with the exception of Portugal
and Italy for the female sample. For disabled and
non-disabled workers, the results seem to show a
clear difference in the levels of job satisfaction of full-
time workers between northern-central Europe and
southern Europe. For instance, in Denmark and
Austria the disabled females working full-time have
the highest levels of job satisfaction (4.86 and 4.59,
respectively), whereas in southern countries such as
Greece (3.51) and Portugal (3.86) they report the
lowest levels.
An important result is obtained when we compare
the levels of job satisfaction of disabled and non-
disabled part-time workers. In most of the European
countries the differences in job satisfaction between
both collectives are not significant at the 5% level.
That is, disabled people working part-time are as
equally satisfied with their jobs as non-disabled
people working part-time. This is the case in all
the European countries analysed, except for The
Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Austria in the
male sample, and The Netherlands, France and
Austria in the female sample. For these sets of
countries, people without disabilities working part-
time have higher levels of job satisfaction than those
of people with disabilities.
If we examine the levels of job satisfaction between
part-time and full-time workers we can observe that
in most cases, and especially in southern Europe,
full-time workers have a premium in job satisfaction
compared to part-time workers. For instance, this
premium for disabled females is especially high in
Greece (0.47), Spain (0.43) and Portugal (0.45).
However, the opposite case occurs in the UK, where
there exists a premium in job satisfaction in favour of
part-time workers. This premium in the UK is
relatively larger for disabled workers than for non-
disabled ones (0.37 vs. 0.16 for males, and 0.63 vs.
0.43 for females). Following Manning and
Petrongolo, who analyse the part-time pay penalty
for females across Europe, there is something of
paradox in the British case: females working part-
time are more likely to suffer a larger pay penalty
than those in other European countries and suffer
higher rates of downward occupational mobility
when they move from full-time to part-time work,
yet they have higher levels of job satisfaction [30].
Although these authors do not study the particular
case of the disabled working-age population, these
workers in the UK could be in the same situation.
Within a general context, we have to bear in mind
that getting a job for certain disabled individuals (for
example, individuals with mental or intellectual
limitations) can become a huge personal challenge,
wherein employment is synonymous with success
and a source of higher levels of personal satisfaction.
Such job satisfaction may even be higher for part-
time employment in some European countries if
disabled people strongly prefer working shorter
hours a week. In general, the existence of
factors affecting labour supply (e.g., social security
systems, disability insurance, supplemental security
income, workers’ compensation, accessibility, costs
Table I. Average level of subjective job satisfaction by country and hours worked for disabled (D) and non-disabled workers (N). Period
1995 – 2001.
Females Males
Full-time Part-time Full-time Part-time
Country N D N D N D N D
Denmark 4.93 4.86* 5.04 4.96 4.99 4.87* 5.04 5.10
Netherlands 4.74 4.53* 4.76 4.59* 4.80 4.64* 4.82 4.67*
Belgium 4.56 4.35* 4.52 4.50 4.58 4.28* 4.54 3.93*
France 4.46 4.17* 4.37 4.09* 4.46 4.20* 4.38 4.13
Ireland 4.69 4.46* 4.53 4.54 4.67 4.39* 4.05 4.04
Italy 4.05 4.06 3.70 3.94 4.09 3.98* 3.30 3.53
Greece 3.79 3.51* 3.08 3.03 3.80 3.69* 3.16 3.13
Spain 4.26 4.08* 3.84 3.66 4.29 4.12 3.75 3.61
Portugal 3.91 3.86 3.45 3.41 4.00 3.74* 3.65 3.30*
Austria 4.96 4.59* 4.94 4.63* 4.94 4.63* 4.68 4.18*
Finland 4.64 4.54* 4.57 4.56 4.57 4.47* 4.32 4.50
Germany 4.39 4.15* 4.21 4.14 4.46 4.30* 4.37 4.25
UK 4.44 4.20* 4.87 4.82 4.28 4.08* 4.44 4.45
Source: European Community Household Panel 1995 – 2001. Note: Individuals aged 15 – 64. Weighted data. For Germany data are only
available for the period 1995 – 1996; *Difference between non-disability and disability figures is significant at p50.05.
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of rehabilitation and transportation, equipment,
healthcare and personal assistant services) and
demand (e.g., productivity of disabled workers,
accommodation costs, and cultural and social
aspects of disability) and policy makers’ actions and
regulations are behind these different part-time rates
(voluntary and involuntary) and levels of satisfaction
for disabled people in each country.
Although the results previously obtained reveal the
high prevalence of people with disabilities in part-
time jobs, it is important to mention that one of the
main characteristics of disabled people is the hetero-
geneity within the group due to the differences
existing for each type of disability. However, in the
ECHP no data exists on the type of disability suffered
by the individuals. Despite controlling somewhat for
this heterogeneity through the variable ‘grade of
severity of the disability’ (i.e., severe, moderate and
no limitation), having this information available
would allow a more detailed analysis since it makes
it possible to identify the different incidence of part-
time employment within each type of disability and
compare the results obtained. Nonetheless, the
results of our study for a set of European countries
offer an important step towards understanding the
particular labour situation of people with disabilities
and the utilisation of part-time employment as a
means to increase employment and income rates in
this group of individuals.
Conclusions
Using data from the ECHP for 13 European
countries during the period 1995 – 2001, we have
analysed the use of part-time employment among
people with disabilities. Our analysis only includes
the period 1995 – 2001 due to the ECHP is actually
the only microeconomic panel dataset containing
information on employment, income, education,
health status, demographic characteristics and living
conditions in the EU-13 countries analysed. The
results show the high concentration of disabled
people in this type of non-standard employment,
especially in countries such as The Netherlands and
Ireland. This concentration of disabled people in
part-time jobs is basically voluntary, indicating in
most cases that part-time employment constitutes a
chosen and preferred labour status. This is mainly
due to part-time employment being used as a means
of accommodating to their disability status and
working life, especially for those with severe limita-
tions due to their health problems. Additionally, the
analysis of the levels of job satisfaction of part-time
and full-time workers has shown that for almost all
the European countries analysed disabled people
who work part-time report levels of job satisfaction
similar to their non-disabled counterparts (or even
higher as in the case of the UK). On the other hand,
people with disabilities working full-time report
lower levels of job satisfaction in all countries
compared to people without disabilities who work
full-time. To shed some light on the validity and
persistence of our results after 2001, we may look
at, for example, the part-time rates for the total
population in the period 2002 – 2005 in Europe.
According to the European Commission [31],
18.4% of workers in 2005 in the EU were in part-
time employment, which reflects a significant and
continuous increase since 2002 (16.6%) of this
more flexible form of employment. In this sense,
part-time has accounted for a larger contribution
(around 60%) to employment creation post-2000
than full-time employment. Moreover, the levels of
involuntary part-time work in Europe are almost the
same in 2001 and 2005 for males (around 24%)
and slightly different for females (from 14.5 –
15.5%). Despite the European macro-economical
circumstances have changed after 2001, it is
unlikely to assume, within a context of recent rise
in part-time work, that the levels of concentration of
disabled people in this type of non-standard
employment have decreased drastically after 2001.
In any case, the existence only of new and updated
databases allows us to confirm the persistence of
these findings in the future.
Despite the problems associated with the part-time
jobs (e.g., lower wages and benefits), part-time
employment may become an effective path from
inactivity to employment or an appropriate instru-
ment to achieve an early return to work for those
becoming disabled. Part-time employment provides
flexibility and is in some cases the only way to
integrate into the labour market those disabled
people who cannot work or remain in a standard
full-time job due to fatigue, lack of energy or other
health problems. In addition, part-time employment
may permit some individuals to work while keeping
social support payments and medical benefits (some
income and transfers program can limit the total
number of hours of work that people with disabilities
can work due to they can lose the health benefits if
they exceed an earning threshold). Therefore, part-
time employment must be encouraged by govern-
ments, policy makers and other institutions because
it allows improvements in levels of income, social
inclusion, personal satisfaction, confidence and
motivation for people with disabilities. As other
studies have stressed, vocational training and reha-
bilitation can in many cases be critical to achieving or
maintaining employment. However, they often start
too late and the probability of reintegration into
employment decreases the more time that the
disabled individual spends outside employment. In
this sense, part-time employment for disabled people
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involved in vocational training and rehabilitation
activities may facilitate a faster and gradual reinte-
gration into employment, reducing disillusion and
anxiety and aid in recovering motivation to return to
work. As the Vocational Rehabilitation and Employ-
ment Recommendation of 1983 approved by the
ILO points out, the measures taken to promote
employment opportunities for disabled persons
should include the provision of part-time employ-
ment and other job arrangements, in accordance
with the capabilities of the individual disabled person
for whom full-time employment is not immediately,
and may not ever be, practicable.
Finally, employers play an important role within
this process, not only providing all workplace and job
adjustments according to the skills and capabilities of
the people with disabilities, but also cooperating and
getting involved with the special situation of this
group. The discriminatory practices many compa-
nies have against disabled people should be aban-
doned in favour of equal opportunities, fighting
prejudice, mistrust, and fear and especially over-
coming the lack of information and education in the
business community regarding such people. As the
OECD [1] and Westmorland and Williams [3]
mention, no matter how good the policy framework
in place is, promoting more access to employment
for the disabled requires profound changes in
behaviour, especially on the part of employers.
Policies can help change negative attitudes toward
the disabled in the workplace by launching informa-
tion campaigns, providing incentives and even
imposing requirements.
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Is part-time work a good or bad opportunity for people with disabilities? 1919
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