Being employed PART-TIME is the new norm

[TwixVoy]

Interesting article from the AFL-CIO web site. IF you were to count part time workers (which has drastically been increasing) the unemployment rate would be 12.5%!

I can tell you from experience working part time at retail, food service, and many other jobs does NOT pay the bills. It doesn't even begin to. I wonder how many of these part time workers would be working full time if given the choice, and it's obvious a lot of former full time workers are only able to find part time work now. Working retail I can not tell you how many people worry about how many hours they are going to get and if they are going to be able to pay the bills. At the store I work at every is very concerned about how few hours will be available in January. Hours cuts are going to be massive.... some of the worst cuts the company has ever made.


http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/12/05/bleeding-jobs-us-loses-533000-jobs-in-november

"In addition, the official unemployment rate of 6.7 percent does not include underemployed workers and those who are discouraged, and if they were included, analysts estimate the U.S. unemployment rate would be 12.5 percent. The numbers of “involuntary part-time workers”—underemployed workers—continued to increase in November, reaching 7.3 million."

[TexasObserver]

1. It's true. Many companies keep people from being full time at all costs.

The time when there was any loyalty from most companies to their employees is long gone.

[Peregrine Took]

2. I know many middle aged librarians who have never held a full time job.

They have no health care insurance or hope of a pension.

[MountainLaurel]

4. Oh yeah

I've worked in places that had split several reference jobs into PT positions.

[JDPriestly]

8. College teachers have been hired part-time with terrible or no

benefits and no job security for decades now.

[Laelth]

13. That was me for ten years before I went to law school.

Taught two or three classes a semester for $12,000/year. I taught more students, every semester, than the tenured professors in my department, but I made a lot less money and had no job security. Of course, I didn't really want job security with a job like that. The State would have been happy to exploit me forever. That's why I went to law school.

The United States is a LIBERAL Country.

:dem:

-Laelth

[nickinSTL]

3. yep. and it's been that way for some time, as far as I can tell...

my wife was a computer programmer - until 2001.

Since then, she's barely had a job at all. She is now working as needed for a local electrician, which pays ok (but nothing like what she made as a programmer), but is spotty work, depending on how much work he gets. Of course, she doesn't get any benefits - fortunately, she's a veteran, so she has VA benefits, though.

[xchrom]

5. highly recommended. nt

[Tigress DEM]

6. Does anyone listen to Ed Schultz on Air America Radio?

This single mother called in today or was it yesterday? I catch him at lunch time so it was within the last 2 days and she was explaining how she was trying to "better" herself but couldn't keep up with college to get a better job, BUT she was doing it mostly on her own without public assistance except medical for her kid.

Props to her in general, but she said, she HAD a job that paid $14 an hour and wanted a better one. OK. In most states that is considered a "living wage" where theoretically you "should" be able to do it on your own and she is proud of herself for managing as well as she is.

OK. She's right in a way, from her limited perspective, but she has NO IDEA of what poverty REALLY is. Two parents with min-wage jobs probably part time make less than she does and have more mouths to feed.

She sounded young and white and not really very freaked out, so I'm guessing she has some family support.

These days your family is often almost as broke as you are, even those doing ok, but being able to go to mom or dad's and watch a dvd together while you borrow their washer and dryer are little things families are good at that lots of poor people may not have been smart enough to be born into having around them.

I guess I'm just saying there is a difference between working class poor and underemployed poor and really strapped poor and just dirt poor. It's all hard to deal with, but the crushing weight of the collapsing economy hits the ones on the very bottom much worse than those a couple of layers up.

[JDPriestly]

9. The woman who called Ed Schultz (I didn't hear the show and

am just speaking of her as an example based on your post) is managing, but she is one paycheck away from the desperate poverty you describe. Also, she is not saving for retirement. In fact, she is probably not saving anything at all. That's the tragedy of it. She may be surviving day to day, but she has no future.

[Tigress DEM]

11. Oh, yeah, props for what she is doing, no question.

What I guess is that I hear in her voice she thinks since she can do it, so can other people.

It's the way white folk just don't "get" how the favortism in this country works for them a lot of the time. Yes, they work hard and yes, no one hands them anything...etc... but these same people come from homes and families that didn't have to leave the towns they lived in back as recently as the 1960's because the white folk just up and decided black folk could leave their homes or be dead in them in the morning.

Can you imagine the difference between jobs paying $14 an hour offered to a young single White mother versus Black, Mexican or Indian? I can and it shouldn't be that way.

It's her youth that says to me she's in that group that feels entitled to $14 an hour with little or no skills walking out of high school and viola she got it and wants more, wants better. I guess that isn't a bad thing, but unless she did go way down, she'll never appreciate what she actually has and how much better off she is than most.

[JDPriestly]

7. And if you counted those who have taken pensions and/or Social

Security earlier than they would have liked or planned, the number would be much higher.

[Hannah Bell]

10. Seems to be a global trend. 1/3 of the Japanese workforce, I read is "casual" -

no security, few or no benefits, no assurance of continuing or full-time employment.

And homelessness is now obvious, whereas I saw not one homeless people when I lived there in the 80s. I lived & traveled in Osaka/Kyoto, Tokyo, & various other regions. I saw nothing like this when I lived there, & I purposely went to what were considered the "slum" & casual labor districts to compare with the US.



"The proliferation of low-wage casual jobs in the service sector has played an important role in the recent rise in homelessness. Specifically, it made more and more workers vulnerable to economic downturns. In fact, in Tokyo, growing proportions of homeless people held casual jobs and worked in cleaning, maintenance, and transportation 8 As a result, miners, for instance, decreased in number from 250,000 in 1970 to 30,000 in 1985 (Sassen 1991: 24). 9 In Tokyo, more than half of the new jobs created in the 1980s were part-time and temporary jobs (Sassen 1994: 111), and most service industries offered casual workers“significantly lower average earning than did manufacturing ” (Sassen 1991: 237). 10 The number of workers with these types of jobs rose by 44 percent between 1985 and 1991 (Machimura 1994: 87)."

[Manifestor_of_Light]

12. I wonder what the real unemployment rate is.

If you count people who are discouraged and don't even look for a job any more. Millions.