Ungrateful slaves? An examination of job quality and job satisfaction for male part‐time workers in the UK

Abstract

Research on part‐time work has concentrated over many decades on the experiences of women but male part‐time employment is growing in the UK. This article addresses two sizable gaps in knowledge concerning male part‐timers: are men's part‐time jobs of lower quality than men's full‐time jobs? Are male part‐timers more or less job‐satisfied compared to their full‐time peers? A fundamental part of both interrogations is whether men's part‐time employment varies by occupational class. The article is motivated by the large body of work on female part‐timers. Its theoretical framework is rooted in one of the most controversial discussions in the sociology of women workers: the “grateful slave” debate that emerged in the 1990s when researchers sought to explain why so many women expressed job satisfaction with low‐quality part‐time jobs. Innovatively, this article draws upon those contentious ideas to provide new insights into male, rather than female, part‐time employment. Based upon analysis of a large quantitative data set, the results provide clear evidence of low‐quality male part‐time employment in the UK, when compared with men's full‐time jobs. Men working part‐time also express deteriorating satisfaction with jobs overall and in several specific dimensions of their jobs. Male part‐timers in lower occupational class positions retain a clear “lead” both in bad job quality and low satisfaction. The article asks whether decreasingly satisfied male part‐time workers should be termed “ungrateful slaves?” It unpacks the “grateful slave” metaphor and, after doing so, rejects its value for the ongoing analysis of part‐time jobs in the formal labor market.

Social stratification in meaningful work: Occupational class disparities in the United Kingdom

“…These include pay and benefits, contracts, job-demands-resources, skills, development, job complexity, work-life balance, work relationships, voice, and health and wellbeing. Factors similar to these are routinely employed in recent sociological job quality and job attribute studies (e.g., Langsaether & Evans, 2020;Warren & Lyonette, 2020) as well as the pioneering industrial sociology research discussed earlier.…”

Work-Time, Male-Breadwinning and the Division of Domestic Labour: Male Part-Time and Full-Time Workers in Unsettled Times

“…The knowledge base on male part-timers in the UK is still only emergent but we do know that while many women enter part-time jobs during the child rearing years to help them reconcile multiple demands from home and paid work (Warren and Lyonette, 2018), male part-timers are generally at different life-course stages. One main group of male part-timers consists of younger men aiming to transition later into full-time jobs and a second group is of older men transitioning gradually into retirement (Delsen, 1998; Warren and Lyonette, 2020a). We also know that, compared with female part-timers, many of whom are themselves in jobs low down the occupational scale, male part-timers are even more concentrated in lower-level work in, for example, elementary and sales occupations, and are often employed in hotels, restaurants and distribution work (Warren and Lyonette, 2015).…”

“…The negative effects of working part-time can be greater for men than women too: men face a greater part-time pay penalty, for example (Belfield et al, 2017; Nightingale, 2019), and are more likely than female part-timers to be in poverty (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2021). A ‘hierarchy of job quality’, based on Tilly’s (1996) influential dimensions of ‘good quality’ part-time work, places male part-timers’ jobs at the bottom (Warren and Lyonette, 2020a). Tilly classified the quality of part-time jobs in the USA according to pay and benefits; skill, training and responsibility; turnover; and promotion ladders, also citing the importance of quality work-time.…”