Dutch phase out 9-to-5 and alter rhythm of life

Remco Vermaire is ambitious and, at 37, the youngest partner in his law firm. His banker clients expect him on call constantly — except on Fridays, when he looks after his two children.

Fourteen of the 33 lawyers in Vermaire’s firm work part time, as do many of their high-powered spouses. Some clients work part time, too. “Working four days a week is now the rule rather than the exception among my friends,” said Vermaire, the first man in his firm to take a ‘daddy day’ in 2006. Within a year, all the other male lawyers with small children had followed suit.

For reasons that blend tradition and modernity, three in four working Dutch women work part time. Female-dominated sectors like health and education operate almost entirely on job-sharing as even childless women and mothers of grown children trade income for time off. That has exacted an enduring price on women’s financial independence.

But in just a few years, part-time work has ceased being the prerogative of woman with little career ambition, and become a powerful tool to attract and retain talent — male and female — in a competitive Dutch labour market.

Indeed, for a growing group of younger professionals, the appetite for a shorter, a more flexible workweek appears to be spreading, with implications for everything from gender identity to rush-hour traffic.

There are part-time surgeons, part-time managers and part-time engineers. From Microsoft to the Dutch economics ministry, offices have moved into ‘flex-buildings’, where the number of work spaces are far fewer than the staff who come and go on schedules tailored around their needs.

The Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peek at the challenges — and potential solutions — that other nations will face as well in an era of a rapidly changing work force.

“Our part-time experience has taught us that you can organise work in a rhythm other than nine-to-five,” said Pia Dijkstra, a member of parliament and well-known former news anchor who led a task force on how to encourage women to work more. “The next generation,” she added, is “turning our part-time culture from a weakness into a strength.”

On average, men still increase their hours when they have children. But with one in three men now either working part time or squeezing a full-time job into four days, the ‘daddy day’ has become part of Dutch vocabulary.

The Netherlands once sought to keep women at home. Between 1904 and 1940, 12 different bills banned various categories of married women from paid work, perpetuating the tradition of domestic motherhood. If a woman wanted to work, a Dutch joke went, she had to become a nun.

The first part-time jobs for married women came with early labour shortages in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until 1996 that the government gave part-time employees equal status with full timers; in 2000 came the statutory right to determine work hours.
Seventy-five per cent of Dutch women now work part time, compared to 41 per cent in other European Union countries and 23 per cent in the US, according to Saskia Keuzenkamp at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research. Twenty-three per cent of Dutch men have reduced hours, compared to 10 per cent across the EU and in the US; another nine per cent work a full week in four days.

When Jan Henk van der Velden, one of Vermaire’s law firm partners, joined 21 years ago, there were no female partners and no man would have dared ask to work part time. Today, six of the nine partners do. It works because the lawyers are flexible — when  Vermaire has a court hearing on a Friday, for example, he swaps with his wife, who is normally off Mondays.

Limitations

In male-dominated fields, the picture is more mixed. After Martina Dopper, a civil engineer at the company Ballast Nedam, requested a three-day week in 2007, she was given to understand that part time meant no promotion.

This month, however, she was promoted. “I hope this means more of my male colleagues will get an opportunity to spend more time with their families,” she said. So far, her own husband, also an engineer, does not dare for fear of jeopardising his career.

Dutch fathers are becoming more vocal. A crop of recent books and websites advise men on combining career with family. Last year, a women’s magazine, ‘Lof’, set up the ‘Working Dad Prize’, which went to a man who won a court case against his employer enforcing his right to work part time.

The government awarded its own ‘Modern Man Prize’ for breaking gender stereotypes. Rutger Groot Wassink won for co-founding a campaign that promotes part-time work for men — and for working four days a week himself. “Men have been excluded from this debate for too long,” said Wassink, noting a poll showing that 65 per cent of Dutch fathers would like to work less.

The Netherlands may be famously liberal — marijuana is tolerated and prostitutes can join a union — but traditional gender stereotypes are strong, and for years, a labour code that empowered employees to reduce their hours has reinforced them by encouraging women to take time off during their child-bearing years.

At 70 per cent, Dutch female employment is high — but Dutch women work on average no more than 24 hours a week. They earn 27 per cent less than men and 57 per cent are considered financially dependent, earning less than 70 per cent of the gross minimum wage, or €997 a month — the equivalent of $1,300. Only four of 20 members of the current cabinet are female and 60 per cent of the companies listed on the Amsterdam Euronext have no women on their boards.

According to Ellen de Bruin, the author of ‘Why Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed’, Dutch women don’t seem to mind too much. She notes that 96 per cent of Dutch part timers tell pollsters they do not want to work more; the Netherlands is that rare country where — even taking housework and child care into account — women work less than men.

‘Spoiled princesses’ is what commentator Elma Drayer calls her Dutch sisters: “Women should behave like grownups, men do it, too. At least they should be financially independent.”

More and more Dutch companies promote flexible work hours. In Tilburg, near the Belgian border, Radboud van Hal leads talent recruitment at Achmea, the largest Dutch insurance company. He has breakfast and dinner with his family, and plays soccer on Wednesday afternoons. He still works a 40-hour week.

Aspects of this ‘new world of work’ concept have been exported to other Microsoft offices, including Norway, France and Australia — though not yet to US headquarters — but the flexibility remains broadest in the Netherlands.

Ninety-five per cent of Dutch Microsoft employees work from home at least one day a week; a full quarter do so four out of five days. Each team has a ‘physical minimum’; some meet twice a week in the office, others once a quarter. Online communication and conference calls save time, fuel and paper waste. The company says it has cut its carbon footprint by 900 tonnes this year.

Even in the Netherlands, this remains the exception — but it is gaining ground. In a 24-hour world, flexibility and job sharing are inevitable, said Martijn de Wildt, chief executive of the human resource consultancy Qidos.

“Part time is an obsolete concept,” he said. “But so is full time.”