Abstract Permanent part-time (PPT) employment grew strongly in Australia between 1987 and 1997, remaining approximately 87 per cent female and ‘non-standard’. Whilst it relieves the insecurity of casualisation, its hours may or may not be family-friendly’. It is located in the career stream only in its minority parental leave form. As an employer initiative, PPT work may allow the ‘flexing’ of hours around monthly or annual averages, creating a finer-tuned temporal and numerical flexibility, and greater work intensification, than is achievable through casualisation. Employers of PPT labour are utilising the workforce re-entry of mature-aged women in jobs classified as base grade, to obtain complex but unacknowledged ‘articulation work’ skills at low cost. In the long run, PPT work may help entrench the standard working hours and social division of labour of the family wage era. A least-bad short-term coping device, PPT work needs to be part of a broader-based solution to the work/life dilemma.
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