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Part Time Work In America

Frank Swoboda The Washington Post WASHINGTON --


 Faced with new cost pressures from global competition, employers throughout the industrial world are turning more and more to part-time workers to help cut costs and gain workplace flexibility. A new study by the International Labor Organization, an arm of the United Nations, shows that even some of the newly industrialized nations are beginning to use part-time workers to remain competitive. The trend toward part-time workers has reached the point where one out of every seven workers in the industrialized world is now a part-time employee. The biggest impact is on women. According to the ILO, 25 percent of all working women in the major industrialized nations worked part time, compared with only 4 percent of men. The study showed that part-time workers were on average paid lower wages than full-time employees, particularly if the part-time worker was a woman. Part-timers also tended to be excluded from benefits such as sick pay, overtime and unemployment insurance. In the United States, for example, the ILO pointed out that part-time workers generally are excluded from the benefits of the new Family and Medical Leave Act, which covers individuals who are employed by an eligible company for at least a year and who worked more than 1,250 hours during the previous 12 months. The ILO figures came from the 24 industrialized nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes the United States and its major trading partners. The study shows that part-time workers account for between 10 percent and 20 percent of all employees in the United States, Belgium, Canada, France and Japan, and more than 20 percent in Australia, Denmark, New Zealand and Britain. The Netherlands, where one of every three jobs are part time, has the highest percentage of part-time workers among those countries surveyed by the ILO. The study does not include millions more workers in the so-called "contingent worker'' category, which includes more than part-time workers. This category also includes temporary full-time employees, contract employees, consultants and others who are not part of the core employee base of a company and often do not receive health-care and other benefits. In the United States there are an estimated 35 million contingent workers, or one out of every four members of the civilian work force. And the number appears to be growing as companies, even profitable firms, continue to downsize to be competitive. Temporary employees accounted for 17 percent of all new jobs created in the United States during the year ended in June, according to the Department of Labor. Perhaps a bigger symbol of the shift toward a contingent work force is the fact that Manpower Inc. is now the nation's largest employer, a position once held by General Motors Corp. Manpower Inc. had 560,000 U.S. employees last year, almost twice as many as GM. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, estimates that 60 percent of all new jobs created between January and July of this year were part time, at least half of which were filled by people looking for full-time work. EPI estimates that part-time jobs accounted for 25.9 percent of all jobs created during the first two years of the economic recovery that began in 1991. The institute estimated that 27.7 percent of all jobs were created by the temporary-help industry. Vittorio DiMartino, chief of the ILO's work-studies section, sees the shift toward part-time work as a potentially troubling trend because most nations aim benefit programs such as unemployment insurance, health-care protection and pensions at full-time workers, leaving large gaps in the social safety net for an emerging work force. DiMartino acknowledged that the shift to part-time work has its advantages for the company and the employee, since it gives both greater flexibility: the company to meet the demands of competition and the employee to deal with the often-conflicting pressures of work and family. But he said the key is how the jobs are perceived by the company and the government: as second-class jobs or as an alternative to full-time employment. Many countries, including the United States, only count those seeking full-time work in their unemployment statistics. And in many European nations with broad social-safety nets such as health coverage and retirement benefits, the benefits are based on how many hours an individual works, DiMartino said. The ILO is working to develop international standards for gauging the status of part-time work. These standards will then become one of the measures nations can use for determining unfair labor practices under international trade agreements.




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