Here's an unorthodox policy move in the midst of a recession: Tell businesses to create more part-time jobs.

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The Guardian reports that the U.K.'s Work and Pensions secretary will announce a series of initiatives aimed at bolstering part-time work. These include urging employers to post full-time jobs as part-time or job-sharing arrangements, as well as creating a national data base of part-time jobs.

In a particularly bold move, the British government is also considering extending flexible working laws -- which allow employees to ask their current boss if they can reduce their hours -- to future employers as well. This would mean that someone who is offered a full time job would be able to ask -- up front -- to adjust his or her hours around, say, managing a school run. While companies would be allowed to refuse such requests, they would need to provide a rational business case for doing so.

This series of proposals represents a major shift in policies affecting family life in Britain. And they are significant on three fronts, for Brits and Americans alike.

For starters, the proposals come amid news that while an economic recovery appears to be underway in Europe, the U.K. remains mired in a recession. At first blush, it isn't obvious why a government would be pushing for less full-time employment during a recession. But maybe it's a pragmatic move. Figures released this summer show that more than a million people in the U.K. were already being forced into part-time work as companies struggled to stay afloat. Rather than losing these skilled workers entirely, a more flexible work arrangement may enable employers to hang onto them for when the recovery comes. Workers at Europe's biggest accounting firm, KPMG, have reportedly responded very favorably to a four-day work week.

The government's push for more part-time work is also interesting politically. It comes at a moment when the Labour government -- and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in particular -- is tanking in the polls. Brown has long been regarded as a fiscal feminist, championing laws that encouraged women's financial independence. In this latest initiative to offer policy support for part-time work, the government seems to be signaling, yet again, that working women are the soccer-mom equivalent of its re-election campaign.

Finally, this governmental push for part-time employment in the U.K. also comes at a juncture when the so-called happiness gap is back in the news. This growing body of research basically shows that in the past 30 years or so, women have grown increasingly unhappy while men seem to be happier.

No one has quite sorted out exactly what's driving this empirical puzzle. But one explanation is that women may be unhappier now than they were 30 years ago because as they've re-entered the workforce in record numbers, their "to-do lists" have grown proportionately, leaving them stressed out, exhausted and . . . well, unhappy.

I won't wade too far into the empirical particulars of this body of research (I'll leave that to the economists). And I'd also be loath to claim that work is responsible for women's unhappiness. (As Barbara Ehrenreich correctly points out, that's not just anti-feminist, but wrong). But it does seem plausible that offering all workers -- including women -- more serious part-time opportunities could only be a good thing for families on many fronts.

Instead, just as more and more women are re-entering the workforce in America, fewer flexible work arrangements are available to them. And as anyone who's ever tried to work part-time knows, those jobs often come without benefits.

I, for one, welcome the British government's attempt to pro-actively rethink the whole issue of part-time work. And I'd love to see the American government do the same. As long as we're rethinking our entire economic model anyway, why not add this to the mix?













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