It's not hard to hire people part time. But that is also not the point that this article is making. The problem is that a whole generation of people in Europe is currently facing unemployment/underemployment and temporary job contracts which prevents them from making plans for the future like starting a family etc.
It is hard. There are incentives for employers to only hire full time (more people = more administrative work and less favorable numbers when computing taxes, etc). There are incentives for unemployed people to seek full time jobs and not part time jobs: You lose unemployment benefits when you do any type of job. The so called welfare cliff.
In at least one western European country part-time has the reputation of being about 2h less work than full-time, but 60% of the pay. Partly because they always demand you come in 4 days out of 5, sometimes all 5, and so traffic time is the same. Knowing that a LOT of people spend 1h+ each way, this means a part-time job effectively shortens your workday (time away from home) from 10h to 8h.
So you can extrapolate from that exactly how employers use part-time.
