“Politics of Women as ‘Outsiders': Labor Market Dualism and Female Atypical Workers”

Recent work has underscored labor unions’ emphasis on the need of full-time workers at the expense of workers holding various forms of temporary contracts (Lindbeck and Snower 1996; Rueda 2007; Bo and Emmenegger, 2012; Palier and Thelen 2010).  Historically, research has also found that labor unions in a number of cases have been less adept at representing women than men (Visser, 2006, Korpi et al. 2011) but that collective bargaining holds positive effects for gender pay equality (Antonczyk et al. 2010., Grimshaw et al. 2013). The number of atypical workers has risen substantially over the past two decades in Europe. This group of workers tends to be composed disproportionately of women and is among the lowest paid segment of the workforce, often facing problems of acute poverty (Kenworthy, 2008, King, 2008).  This paper studies differing union strategies in Italy, Sweden and Germany with respect to the challenge of rising number of women among temporary workers. The question is considered in light of three dimensions: skill-recognition and pay inequality, flexible working time, and access to social services.