Beyond the strike The issue is not the number of part-time workers. It's how they are treated By Chris Tilly, 08/10/97 At one minute after midnight last Sunday night, 185,000 Teamster union members walked off the job at United Parcel Service. UPS's shipments of 12 million packages a day slowed to a trickle, snarling businesses and inconveniencing consumers across the country. The spark for this showdown was the company's aggressive expansion of part-time jobs, at half the hourly wage of full-time positions. The strike cast new attention on the issue of part-time work. Have US businesses created too many part-time jobs? The Teamsters say ''yes,'' urging UPS to convert thousands of part-time jobs to full-time. UPS says ''no,'' arguing that it needs low-cost, short-hour workers to compete with non-union rivals such as Federal Express. In various forms, this debate is echoed across the country. The real answer is not so simple. Yes, we do need more full-time jobs for frustrated job-seekers who want them, although not everybody does. But rather than just worry about the number of part-time jobs in the economy, we should be concerned about the kind of jobs they are. Most short-hour jobs - including those at UPS - are second-class jobs providing low wages, limited fringe benefits, and few promotion opportunities. While the Teamsters' push for more full-time jobs has grabbed headlines, the need for more equal treatment of full-time and part-time workers is even more critical. The growth of part-time employment looks more like a gradually rising tide than an explosion. In 1957, thirteen percent of the work force worked part time; today, it is 18 percent. Due to robust economic growth in the 1990s, the percentage of part-time workers has declined slightly over the last several years, as it does in most economic expansions. But we can expect another burst of short-hour jobs when the economy cools off once more. Some companies - and in a few cases entire industries - have outpaced the rising tide, creating localized floods of part-time employment. UPS is one example: part-time workers have soared from 42 percent of the company's unionized work force in 1986 to over 60 percent today. And among supermarkets, between 1962 and 1994, part-time employment rocketed from 35 percent to 62 percent. Employers like these have two main motivations for pumping up their part-time ranks: They use part-timers to selectively staff predictable peak times. And they cut labor costs by hiring part-timers at reduced wages with more limited benefits. Lower wages and fewer benefits, of course, spell bad news for workers. On average, private sector part-time workers earn only half as much as full-time workers. UPS matches this economy-wide pattern: The company's part-timers average $9.65 per hour, just under half the typical full-time wage of $19.95. Economy-wide, fewer than one-fifth of part-time workers receive health insurance from their employers, compared with three-quarters of full-timers. Short-hour workers have fewer opportunities for upward mobility. In some companies, part-time employees who bid for job openings are treated no differently than outside applicants. For all these reasons, the typical part-time job is truly only half a job. And the businesses themselves may not be getting as good a deal as they think. Part-time workers typically leave jobs quickly, showing less commitment and motivation than their full-time counterparts. ''In my produce department, one good full-timer can do as much work [per hour] as any three part-timers,'' remarked one supermarket manager in a survey of Boston area buinesses. As grocery stores stocked up on part-timers from the 1960s through the 1990s, they saw productivity fall. UPS charged toward a completely part-time work force in central sorting facilities during the 1990s; the number of packages sorted per hour dropped by one-third between 1993 and 1996. But while dollar savings in wages and benefits are highly visible to corporate bean counters, the business costs of part-time employment - lagging productivity, lost customers - are harder to detect. Middle managers complain privately about the problems of managing a part-time work force. ''If it was my business, I'd like to have a lot of full-time people working for me,'' the same supermarket manager commented - but at this company and many others, the top brass have continued the part-time push. The upward tide of part-time jobs has been coupled with other workplace changes. Employment in temporary help agencies has proliferated twentyfold since the early 1960s (though still totaling only 2 percent of the work force), so that today Manpower Inc. employs more people over the course of a year than any other US business. Downsizing, outsourcing, subcontracting, and privatization have pulled the rug out from formerly steady, well-paid jobs. Almost all jobs, whether or not they bear the label ''temporary,'' have become less secure. Soon after AT&T announced layoffs of 40,000 workers in 1996, AT&T Vice President for Human Resources James Meadows said, ''People need to look at themselves as self-employed, as vendors who come to this company to sell their skills.'' He added, ''In AT&T, we have to promote the whole concept of the work force being contingent, even though most of the contingent workers are inside of our walls.'' All of these shifts help explain pervasive feelings of economic insecurity in spite of falling unemployment rates and a percolating stock market. Because the part-time work force is large and visible, it has become a touchstone for workers' wider fears. So why not simply conclude that part-time work is in itself a serious problem? True, there are too many part-time jobs. Four million Americans are involuntary part-timers, working part-time hours when they would prefer full-time jobs. But such involuntary part-time workers only account for about one part-timer in five. Most part-time employees choose to work short hours. The great majority are women, many with small children. Others include students, seniors seeking partial retirement, and people with disabilities. A full-time job shortage is not the main issue for them. Instead, they face a different problem: Because they need hours flexibility, they are treated as second-class citizens in the work force. It is against the law to discriminate against women or people of color. It is not against the law to pay part-timers half the hourly wage of full-time workers, or to deny them standard fringe benefits, such as health insurance, that are available to other workers, or to bar them from opportunities for promotion. Part-time jobs need not be lousy jobs. A sprinkling of businesses across the country have created high-quality, short-hour jobs with equal pay and equal or proportional benefit plans. Most often, employers craft these jobs on a case-by-case basis ''to attract specific, talented individuals,'' as the manager of pension systems at a Boston-area insurance company put it. In one typical scenario, a valued female employee has a child and negotiates a reduced schedule with her manager. There are not enough of such high quality, part-time jobs. In fact, though several million part-time workers would prefer full-time jobs, an equal number of full-time employees express a desire to work short hours. A social engineer might be tempted to suggest that these two groups trade places, but any such proposal is doomed to failure. The unhappy full-timers are not longing to sort packages at UPS at a starting wage of $8 an hour, let alone bag groceries at Star Market for $6 an hour. They want good part-time jobs - which remain in short supply. What today's work force needs, then, is both more full-time jobs and better part-time jobs. To their credit, the Teamsters have pressed UPS on both fronts - challenging the company to convert thousands of part-time jobs into full-time ones, but also calling for a boost in the part-time starting wage (which has not increased since 1982) and a higher minimum-hours guarantee for part-timers. In fact, in the few cases where high-quality, part-time jobs are available as a matter of company policy rather than negotiable on an individual basis, there is almost always a union involved. For instance, the Service Employees International Union won employees of Santa Clara County, California, the right to move between full-time and part-time hours without jeopardizing their pay or benefits. Unions' muscle offers cold comfort to the nearly 9 private sector employees out of 10 who lack union coverage. But government can play an important role as well, as it has in the past with minimum-wage, child-labor, and anti-discrimination laws. In Massachusetts, House Bill 3772, currently in the Commerce and Labor Committee thanks to the efforts of advocacy groups such as the Campaign on Contingent Work, would mandate equal pay and proportional benefits for part-time and temporary workers. Such a law would dramatically improve part-time jobs. Less obviously, it would also prompt a shift from part-time to full-time employment. When similar legislation was proposed (unsuccessfully) at a national level, a Wall Street Journal survey asked businessmen and businesswomen how they would respond. Many said that if they could no longer pay part-timers less, they would make many more jobs full-time. Last week's UPS strike is not the first time that the Teamsters have walked out over the issue of part-time work. Three years ago, 70,000 Teamsters struck Trucking Management Inc. over the company's proposal to shift more jobs from full-time to part-time hours, with reduced benefits and pay. After several tense weeks, Trucking Management gave in, withdrawing the proposal. Union members on the picket lines declared, ''We're doing this for the next generation.'' Not a bad slogan for all of us as we consider how to respond to the growth of part-time jobs. This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 08/10/97. Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Dear, you increase the dopamine in my accumbens." -- words of love for the 1990s.
