Labour Market and Employment in Germany The spread of“Non-Regular” Employment and Its Causes Werner Kamppeter, Representative of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Korea Office In Germany non-regular work, usually called“atypical employment”, has increased notably over the past 15 to 20 years. Non-regular and atypical employment are generic terms, which do not go into the specifics of rather diverse labour market and employment conditions. Both terms are antonyms to regular employment, that is to employment under indefinite contracts which obey all relevant laws, including the full payment of social security contributions. Definitions of non-regular employment vary. The OECD classifies such employment into temporary and part-time workers and subclassifies temporary workers into fixed-term con­tract, temporary agency workers, seasonal workers and on-call workers. Korean official statistics too distinguish between fixed-term employment workers( 한시적 근로자 / 기간제 근로자 ) and part-time worker( 시간제 근로자 ), yet there is a third basic category, that of non-standard employment( 비전형 근로자 ), which includes temporary agency workers, daily workers and employment by households among others. The KLSI dif­ferentiates further and reports much higher levels of non-regular work than the government. Clearly, there are many ways to statistically look at the phenomenon of irregular work. Much depends on definitions and on the adjudication of cases to these definitions. Besides, there are grey areas that can remain hidden from the eyes of the statistician. Hence, the estimates of the volume of non-regular work can vary considerably. According to the Korean Statistical Of­fice, 23 percent of the wage-earning population were in part-time and temporary employment, while the share of all non-regular workers amounted to 35 percent in 2007. The KLSI esti­mate is as high as 55 percent of the workforce. 1 In Germany too, statistical definitions and empirical estimates of„atypical employment“ vary. According to the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung its share amounts to approximately 30 percent of wage earners. The following diagram presents an estimate of different types of irregular employment in East and West Germany. * ohne mini- und mini-jobs 1 Kim Yoo-soon, Working Korea 2007, Korea Labour and Society Institute, p. 32.