Off‐the‐job training and the shifting role of part‐time and temporary employment across institutional models. Comparing Italian and British firms

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12303
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Giulio Pedrini
• Published date: 01 September 2020

Off‐the‐job training and the shifting role of

part‐time and temporary employment

across institutional models. Comparing

Italian and British firms

Giulio Pedrini

ABSTRACT

This article investigates intensity and composition of off‐the‐job training investments

of Italian and British firms in relation to their workforce heterogeneity with respect

to the presence of non‐standard workers. The main purpose is to assess the relation-

ship between off‐the‐job training volumes and composition and the recourse to the

main types of non‐standard employment, that is temporary and part‐time contracts,

at firm level. Empirical evidence drawn from national surveys of the two countries

shows more similarities than expected in terms of the correlation between

non‐standard employment and training volumes whilst substantial differences arise

when disaggregating training interventions according to the types of skills to be de-

veloped. Both institutional settings and the different roles of part‐time and tempo-

rary employment in the labour markets of the two countries contribute to the

interpretation of the results.

1 INTRODUCTION

Firm‐provided training has been increasingly recognised as crucial to create, update

and recombine skills according to organisational needs. Trained workers undertake

more complex tasks and/or complete the old tasks better or faster than before, en-

abling firms to cope with increased pressures induced by technological change and

globalisation (European Commission, 2007). Additionally, computerization and tech-

nological change have stimulated an increasing demand of transferable skills from the

employers (Mason and Bishop, 2015). Acknowledgement of the importance of work-

place training to maintain and improve firms’competitiveness has raised concerns

about the effects of the increasing recourse to non‐standard forms of employment

across Europe (e.g. Cabrales et al., 2014). This concern applies not only to temporary

workers but also to part‐timers. Notwithstanding that the European directive on

part‐time work (Directive 97/81/EC) stresses the principle of non‐discrimination,

there remains evidence of lower pay, lower upward mobility and poorer job satisfac-

tion among part‐time workers (e.g. Manning and Petrongolo, 2008).

❒Giulio Pedrini, Faculty of Economics and Law, Kore University of Enna, Enna, Italy. Correspondence

should be addressed to Giulio Pedrini, Faculty of Economics and Law, Kore University of Enna, Enna,

Italy.

Email: giulio.pedrini@unikore.it

Industrial Relations Journal 51:5, 427–453

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

An extensive strand of empirical literature has explored the relationship between

flexible contracts and training investments from the supply side, using the information

on household and individual workers. Few studies have, however, investigated this ef-

fect from the labour demand standpoint using data at the firm level, and none with a

comparative perspective. Moreover, most of them have looked at training volumes

without distinguishing different types of skills involved in such programmes. This pa-

per tries to fill this gap with a comparative analysis of the relationship between

non‐standard workers and workplace training at firm level both in its quantitative

and qualitative aspects in two different European countries that face similar chal-

lenges with respect to the need to increase training investments: the UK and Italy.

As a general rule, Italy and the UK belong to different institutional regimes (Hall

and Soskice, 2001; Amable, 2003; Molina and Rhodes, 2007), yet they have been fac-

ing some convergent trends during the last two decades along with a call into question

of the analytical value of the ideal types associated with the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’

approach (Heyes et al., 2012). On the one hand, the UK was one of the first countries

to introduce flexibility‐oriented reform processes, but it is not considered any more as

a standing‐alone country in comparison with continental Europe (Poutsma

et al., 2006). On the other hand, Italy’s labour market regime has been characterised

by a decline of the role of the state as an agent of coordination and by a hybridisation

of its model of capitalism further to the establishment of institutions that support, for

instance, both wage coordination and labour markets flexibility (Simoni, 2012). Italy

thus occupies an increasingly ambiguous position in the traditional dichotomies of va-

rieties of capitalism and ‘cannot be seen to constitute a coherent capitalist archetype

in the same manners as others’(Goergen et al., 2012: 524). This co‐evolution turns out

in potential similarities having theoretically penalised the attitude towards training in-

vestments in both countries (Pedrini, 2016). In parallel, an increasing segmentation of

the labour markets has been observed in both countries (Marsden, 2007; Sacchi and

Vesan, 2015). The pattern of this segmentation has, however, progressed along differ-

ent paths. The duality of the Italian labour market has mainly concerned the divide

between permanent and fixed‐term workers (Berton and Garibaldi, 2012) and to a

more limited extent between part‐time and full‐time workers (Boeri and Garibaldi,

2007). In the UK, the separation is mainly between part‐time (including ‘zero‐hour

contracts’) and full‐time employment, whilst temporary contracts are frequently used

by firms as stepping stones to more stable jobs (Booth et al., 2002). Finally, in both

countries, labour productivity levels significantly lag behind those found in the main

other European countries. This evidence, combined with the lack of institutions that

help employers spread the risk of long‐term training and keep high training participa-

tion even after labour market reforms, such as in Germany, has raised concerns on

how to leverage on training investments in order to bridge the ‘productivity gap’that

plagues these countries (Barnett et al., 2014; Bugamelli et al., 2018).

I address these issues by exploring the relationship between off‐the‐job training and

labour market flexibility practices in these two countries and enlightening the correla-

tion between training interventions and the recourse to temporary and part‐time con-

tracts. Findings on training volumes are quite similar, but when disaggregating

training investments according to the degree of portability of the skills they aim to de-

velop, our evidence highlights the shifting roles of part‐time and temporary contracts

in Italian and British labour markets, which in turn can be traced back to that stream

of literature that stresses the role of institutional settings in affecting the nature of

non‐standard employment under many aspects (Hipp et al., 2015).

428 Giulio Pedrini

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd