[lbo-talk] More part-time work is bad sign for U.S.

[Dorene Cornwell]

Actually the part-time employment issue is not new: somewhere in Bush
ii's first term he was going on about how many jobs had been created
and a comic quipped, yeah but a person needs three of them to survive.

Part of the part-time employment issue is because of employer-paid
health care. Most employers, workers have to work a certain number of
hours / week to qualify for the group health plan and it's easier to
have more employees working just below the threshold than to pay
insurance.

The current crisis is dragging part-tune employment out in new ways.
The WA state government is considering mandatory 4-day work weeks.
Some organizations are doing foced furloughs. One small office I know
of, the CEO took a 20% pay cut with SMALLER cuts down the line.
Honestly, I think partial furloughs for everyone is easier on workers
than layoffs and forcing the people remaining to do three people's
jobs, something that seems rife at some local large employers.

The forced furlough topic also seems ironic: US workers get less paid
vacation than workers in practically any other industrialized country,
even though some measures of productivitiy are better in countries
with reasonable levels of paid vacation.

All this is a long-winded way of speculating: are there opportunities
for labor / workers out of all this extra time? Yeah, layoffs suck.
Yeah financial insecurity sucks, but if you cannot get paid anyway,
why not spend time doing something worthwhile that could not be done
with an insane fulltime work schedule.

Anyone else see any possible opportunities out of this mess?

DC

On 11/29/08, uvj at vsnl.com <uvj at vsnl.com> wrote:
> More part-time work is bad sign for U.S.
> http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4AN04W20081124?sp=true
>
> Mon Nov 24, 2008
>
> By Lucia Mutikani
>
> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Seven months after losing a job in construction,
> Lorenzo Henderson found work earlier this month packing shelves at a
> supermarket three days a week, joining a trend toward part-time work that is
> worrying economists.
>
> The 24-year-old father of two from Washington said he had to settle for
> part-time work after becoming increasingly disillusioned about getting a
> full-time job anytime soon.
> http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4AN04W20081124?sp=true
>
>
>
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