Three Worlds of Working Time: The Partisan and Welfare Politics of Work Hours in Industrialized Countries

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329204269983
• Date: 01 December 2004
• Published date: 01 December 2004
• Author: Brian Burgoon,Phineas Baxandall
• Subject Matter: Articles

10.1177/0032329204269983ARTICLEPOLITICS & SOCIETYBRIAN BURGOON and PHINEAS BAXANDALL

Three Worlds of Working Time:

The Partisan and Welfare Politics of

Work Hours in Industrialized Countries

BRIAN BURGOON

PHINEAS BAXANDALL

This article argues that annual hours per employed person and per working-age

person capture important dimensions of political-economic success that should

be weighed against aggregateemployment and wealth patterns. It also argues that

partisan-driven work-time policies and welfare-regime institutions give rise to

diverging Social Democratic, Liberal,and Christian Democratic “worlds” of work

time in terms of these two measures.Descriptive statistics for eighteen Organization

for Economic Cooperation and Development countries revealbroad clustering and

trendssuggestive of the Three Worlds,while panel estimation suggests the influence

of partisan and welfare-institutional conditions underlying them. Case study of Fin-

land, the United States, and the Netherlands further illustrates the political process

and sequence of the Three Worlds.

Keywords: working hours; time; welfare state; social policy; partisan; Christian

Democracy; Social Democracy

How much people work is an important and contested part of economic life.

Howeverit is measured, the number of hours on the job captures how much time a

person spends on earning instead of on other pursuits. By some normative stan-

dards, working fewer hours is an important measure of the “good life,” to be

Wewish to particularly thank the following colleaguesfor their useful critiques and suggestions:

Mark Blyth, Fred Block, Archon Fung, Colin Hay,Anton Hemerijck, Wade Jacoby,Gerd Junne, Jac-

queline O’Reilly,Martin Rein, Robert van der Veen, Robin Varghese,and seminar participants at the

Universityof Amsterdam, Council for European Studies, andAmerican Political Science Association.

BrianBurgoon also wishes to thank the Amsterdam School for Social Research for financial support.

POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 32 No. 4, December 2004 439-473

DOI: 10.1177/0032329204269983

© 2004 Sage Publications

439

weighed against growth, employment, and other measures of economic well-

being. Higher number of hours worked by Americans than their European or even

Japanese counterparts has raised concern about “overwork” that blemishes the

United States’ employment and growth success, while the long vacations and

early retirement of many European economies has raised concern about sustain-

ing economic growth and competitiveness.1Whether we lament the “overworked

American” or his “lazy-European” counterpart, working time matters to our

commonsense judgments of political-economic success. It is also the subject of

political fights between employers, unions, political parties, and others, most

directly over regulation of workdays and weeks, holidays, overtime,and the like.

France’shours-reductions to fightunemployment in the 1990s, and more recently

the German union I. G. Metall’s failed bid to extend the thirty-five-hourworking

week to East Germany all show that these fights can be front-page news.

Yetwe know surprisingly little about the politics of work time. The compara-

tive politics literature with much to say about political-economic differences

between industrialized countries has directed little attention to working time. The

study of working time, meanwhile, tells us plenty about work-time patterns, the

efficacy of work-time regulations, and industrial relations that shape both. But

it tells us much less about the work-time consequences of policies less directly

regulating such hours, such as social-welfare policies, or about howpartisan poli-

tics that often cut across simple Left-Right division shape national work-time

patterns.

This article’sambition is, thus, to bring more politics into the study of working

time, and more work time into the study of politics. It focuses on aggregate work

patterns capturing how much different polities work, and considers how broad

policy and social policyinstitutions might underlie these patterns. The main claim

is that the partisan-institutional differences underlying distinct Social Demo-

cratic, Liberal, and Christian Democratic “worlds of welfare capitalism”2also

generate discernable worlds of working time. Right (neoliberal) parties champion

market-led, minimalist welfare states, and they side with employers against work-

time limits, encouraging long work hours. Social Democratic parties champion

“solidaristic” welfare and work-time policies encouraging fewer work hours, but

also higher, more uniform, and equitable employment levels that limit aggregate

reductions in hours. Finally, Christian Democratic parties and their conservative-

welfare legacies have fostered male-breadwinner work and widespread labor-

market exclusion, while recent reforms of such regimes of “welfare without

work” combine part-time female employment, work sharing, and resistance to

the “twenty-four-hour economy” to produce the Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development’s (OECDs) lowest work hours.

This portrait of three worlds of work time finds empirical support in both quan-

titativeand qualitativeoverviews of work-time experience in industrialized coun-

tries. Using improved data on work hours in eighteen OECD countries, descrip-

tive statistics reveal broad clustering and trends suggestive of the Three Worlds,

440 POLITICS & SOCIETY

while time-series cross-section analysis suggests the independent influence of

partisan and welfare-institutional conditions underlying those worlds. Finally,

brief case studies from each regime type—Finland, the United States, and the

Netherlands—identify the process and sequence of work-time politics, further

supporting the argument.

1. UNDERSTUDIED POLITICS IN THE STUDY OF WORK TIME

Study of working time has been the province of labor economists and

industrial-relations specialists studying work time as part of worker life chances

and to measure economic productivity. A big task has been to measure basic

work-time differences over time and space.Despite significant problems in com-

paring national work time, a range of measures show that hours per employee and

per person in most industrialized countries have declined steadily since the

1870s.3Such trends reflect productivity gains associated with industrialization,

hence the generally longer hours in the undeveloped world.

Of particular interest in the work-time literature are the growing differences in

working time among industrialized countries since the 1960s, a snapshot of which

can be found in Figure 1. As this figure suggests, some OECD countries have

experienced substantial swings in the annual hours per employed person, as the

Swedish trend suggests, while the more general pattern in recent decades has been

BRIAN BURGOON and PHINEAS BAXANDALL 441

1200

1300

1400

1500

1600

1700

1800

1900

2000

2100

2200

1960 1973 1980 1990 2000

Annual Hours per Employed Person .

Japan

U.S.

OECD

Germany

Netherlands

Sweden

Figure 1. Annual hours per employed person in selected OECD countries, 1960-2000.

Source:Groningen 2003; OECD various. Total Economy Database (Groningen, the Netherlands: Uni-

versity of Groningen and the Conference Board, 2002), http://www.eco.rug.nl/ggdc.