Part-time work is great, if you can afford it.
Several reports lately have found a rapid increase in the percentage of working Americans whose jobs are only part-time. That’s all some people want or need. In fact, some stories about the trend depict a generation of independent contractors and part-timers who enjoy more freedom to do what they want without being tied down to a 40-hour work week and all that comes with it.
But some troubling forces are at work in this trend. There’s some evidence companies are relying more on part-time workers so they don’t have to provide benefits, an age-old practice that has grown under the pressures of the Affordable Care Act.
And part-time work is responsible for a big asterisk on rosy job-growth reports. The government says 288,000 jobs were created last month; what most people miss or overlook is the fact that the increase comes from part-time jobs, which soared by about 800,000 to more than 28 million. Full-time jobs actually decreased by 523,000 slots.
Is this a fundamental shift in the American workforce or the byproduct of a slow recovery and costly insurance mandates? It may be both. Either way, it’s shaping workers’ attitudes and expectations. In an article headlined “The Flex Economy,” the Christian Science Monitor describes the change this way:
“Its emergence marks one more change in the often one-dimensional work model that existed for much of the post-war era, in which people toiled loyally for one firm for 40 years, then took a pension and retired to Tampa or Tucson.”
Forty-year jobs and pensions are going the way of the dinosaur.
In the Wall Street Journal, Mortimer Zuckerman states the situation more bleakly: “Faith in the American dream is eroding fast. The feeling is that the rules aren’t fair and the system has been rigged in favor of business and against the average person.”
Of course, this is about more than feelings. Hard numbers drive those sentiments. Companies are putting less money into payrolls to have more in profits. The share of financial compensation and outputs going to labor, the Journal reports, has fallen from about 65 percent before 1980 to less than 60 percent today. Technology is responsible in part; many jobs don’t require as much manpower. But technology has not decreased the need to put food on the table and a roof over your head.
Only when the economy heats up will companies return to competing for employees and enticing them with full-time jobs and great benefits. If that supply-and-demand principle goes the way of the dinosaurs, too — if the jobless recovery is in fact a jobless economy — we’re in trouble.