Partial unemployment: the regulation of short time working in Britain

The recession of the seventies and eighties has focused the attention of a generation of politicians, policy-makers and academics, as well as our popular culture, on the nature and significance of the declining availability of work. Much debate and comment has passed on questions as to how to stimulate growth, how to reduce working time so that the available work can be shared around, how to reduce unemployment and how to avoid redundancies. Surprisingly, little attention has been given to the more specific problem, addressed in this thesis, of how to regulate and compensate for partial unemployment caused by short- time working and lay-offs. Although the media regularly reports these occurrences, the legal response to them is not so easy to report, define or comment upon. Yet short-time working and layoff are not new. Economic boom and depression has accompanied the development of industrialised countries for more than a century.1 Furthermore, partial unemployment may arise at any time as a result of natural disasters, mechanical failure, temporary market failure or strike action which cause temporary stoppages of work.