Part-time working: part 2 - Part-time working options and arrangements - In July 2000, the Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000 came into force. The basic aim of the Regulations, according to the Government, is to make it unlawful for employers to treat part-tinie workers less favourably than comparable full-time workers, in respect of all their terms and conditions of employment, unless such treatment can be objectively justified. Subsequeintly, in June 2001, the re-elected Labour Government announced the appointment of the new Work and Parent Taskforce - expected to report to ministers in November this year - which is charged with examining how to introduce a right for parents of young children to ask their employers for flexible working hours. With the issues surrounding part-time working currently high on the agenda of employers, we present the findings from the second part of the 2001 IRS survey of part-time working arrangements, policies and practices in 94 organisations. Our main findings include: remarkably, only a minority of employers (four in 10) report that part-timers are predominantly those who were deliberately recruited to part-time jobs, compared with more than a quarter who say that they are mainly those who joined as full-timers and subsequently reduced their hours voluntarily - while almost one third say there are about equal numbers of each of these categories; only one in six respondents has a written procedure covering requests from workers to reduce their working hours to part-time; and requests for a move from full- to part-time employment would be most likely to be agreed in the case of a parent wanting to return on a reduced-hours basis following the birth of a child - however, more than half of respondents mentioned a range of other circumstances in which they would usually agree such applications, including the general care of dependants (such as sick or elderly relatives), educational purposes, health reasons or as a pre-retirement working arrangement.