Part-Timers Often Choose Limited Hours

Here we go again with the heavyweight boxing match. Our ringside commentator, the Watchdog Press, gives us the blow-by-blow. “In this corner, the Highly Profitable Corporation, wearing crisp pinstripe blue, represented today by--UPS! In the opposite corner, the Downtrodden Worker, wearing drab brown, represented today by--the Teamsters! Will the Corporation once again prevail in shoving more workers into horrible part-time jobs? Or will the Worker finally succeed in scratching out an impossible victory? Will the never-ending march toward a part-time work force ever end?”

There’s no better story than the leader of organized labor, in the guise of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, calling the surge in part-time workers an “ugly trend.” According to the Teamsters, converting part-time to full-time jobs is a main sticking point of the negotiations. As goes UPS, so goes the nation?

Perhaps not. Behind the scenes, the Teamsters’ own June 26 press release indicts UPS for using more part-timers “even while U.S. workplaces overall have become less reliant on a part-time, high turnover jobs strategy.” So, are part-time jobs surging or not?

The answer is that the Teamsters press release got it right: Part-time jobs are not booming in the U.S. And they haven’t been for two decades.

The facts: 17% to 18% of all workers are part-timers, meaning they work fewer than 35 hours per week. That figure has stayed roughly constant since the mid-1970s, rising with each recession, but then falling back again. Part-time jobs are not epidemic.

At UPS, part-time jobs have grown much faster than have full-time jobs. UPS claims that most of its part-timers are voluntary, meaning that they don’t want to work more hours. Neither side has provided hard numbers. But the company’s claim jibes with the picture elsewhere: Nationwide, four in five part-time workers are voluntary.

What about the involuntary part-timers who want more hours? They accounted for about 3% of all workers nationwide over the past decade, slightly more during recessions. These workers have legitimate needs to earn more money to support their families. But it’s not clear that they are in dead-end jobs. Many people take on part-time jobs while they look for something better. At UPS, more than 13,000 part-timers have moved into full-time jobs over the past four years. The Teamsters can argue that more part-timers deserve full-time jobs, but involuntary part-time jobs are not booming across the country.

So why do we keep hearing about the inexorable trend toward more part-timers? Four reasons. First, part-time employment did trend up from the 1960s through the mid-1970s, but it has not done so since 1975. Second, some analysts argue that part-time employment increased between 1993 and 1994, but that is simply an artifact of a change in Bureau of Labor Statistics data collection techniques. As of March 1997, the level had fallen again to just slightly above 18% of all workers.

Third, part-timers frequently are lumped together with other “bad” jobs, including temporary and contingent jobs. But the best measures place the current temporary and contingent labor force at no more than 5% of all workers. Adding in the 3% of involuntary part-timers, no more than 8% of all jobs are these “bad” jobs. In fact, companies sometimes use temps to screen for full-time workers. And many people value the flexibility temporary jobs provide. Fourth, people mistakenly assume that employers have to convert full-time to part-time jobs to reduce health care costs. At UPS, part-timers get health care benefits, though nationally, only a minority of part-timers do. But instead of converting to part-time jobs, employers have shifted more health care costs onto their full-time employees and made more active use of managed health care plans. This has stemmed the tide of rising health care costs without a shift toward part-timers.

Workers in today’s labor market do face tough times: The less-skilled, less-educated have seen their real wages drop or stagnate over the past two decades. There has been a dramatic increase in inequality. But the part-time bogeyman is not to blame.