Many Part-Timers Must Trade Job Security for Flexibility
It is true that millions of Americans want and need part-time and temporary jobs, flexible work schedules, job-sharing and other variations on the traditional, full-time, 40-hour work week.
As Paul Rupert of San Francisco-based New Ways to Work says, time has become more important than money for many people who are faced with sometimes overwhelming problems in caring for children and elderly relatives. Many also need time to pursue their educational goals. Flexitime is essential for them.
It also is true that such a system can be a boon to cost-conscious companies that hate to pay their employees for any time they are not actually hard at work.
In theory, then, it would seem that the system would be a boon to the entire nation since it satisfies the wants and needs of so many workers and companies.
Often ignored, however, is the fact that millions of other workers are hurt by the harsh realities of the seemingly benign concept.
Those in this steadily growing segment of the work force are called “contingent,” “just-in-time” or “disposable” workers. It is estimated that they make up a whopping 20% to 25% of all workers in the United States, and about two-thirds of them are women, minorities, youths and older workers.
Too many employers callously treat them as disposable people who can be dumped from their jobs on a moment’s notice and who are compelled by economic or family circumstances to accept low wages and few, if any, fringe benefits.
Few get such customary fringe benefits as health insurance, pensions, vacations, holidays, sick leave or maternity leave, and those who do are usually professionals or highly skilled workers in top pay brackets. Disposable workers also almost always give up job security and opportunities for advancement in a company.
A tremendous number of these workers make the sacrifices in exchange for the time they need to handle the necessities of their personal lives, or because the full-time jobs they want are not available.
The increasing size of the disposable work force is due in part to the determination of many employers to improve their firms’ financial statements by becoming “lean and mean,” and while that may sound good to corporate bottom-line watchers, for many workers the operative word in the catchy phrase is “mean.”
New legislation cannot stop all abuses of these workers by companies, but Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) has proposed a law that can help somewhat.
She wants Congress to require employers to provide both health insurance and pensions for part-time and temporary workers on a prorated basis, as some companies now do. That means they would get at least some benefits, based on the amount of time they are on the job.
At the same time, Schroeder’s measure would do nothing to help the workers get higher wages or other benefits most of us know are essential, such as paid holidays, vacations and sick leave.
The push to get some health-care protection for disposable workers and millions of full-time workers who also are uninsured is adding what may be a critical new force behind the long-standing campaign of liberals for some form of a nationwide health insurance plan for everyone.
Presidential candidates Michael S. Dukakis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson back national health insurance, which first was advocated by President Harry S. Truman in the late 1940s. Intense conservative opposition has blocked it.
But Audrey Freedman, a labor expert with the Conference Board, which has representatives from many of the nation’s largest corporations, says soaring medical costs are persuading some companies to reconsider their opposition to national health insurance.
The companies may support a national health plan, particularly if they are required by law to provide private insurance for all of their employees, including the disposable ones.
Freedman called for a national health-care system to help break the link between health care and jobs in testimony at a congressional hearing on disposable workers last week.
Rupert, of New Ways to Work, told the hearing that a national health insurance plan must be seriously considered again because the cost of health insurance to companies and individuals has influenced far too many things, including the growth of the disposable work force.
Many employers arbitrarily limit the working hours of millions of employees to prevent them from accumulating enough time on the job to qualify for their companies’ health-care programs. That means employers can reduce their costs for health care and other benefits by using disposable workers instead of full-timers.
While a disposable work force primarily harms most workers themselves, it can have serious negative consequences for employers, too.
For instance, workers’ interest in and loyalty to their employer suffers when they are only marginally attached to their employer. Yet workers with a sense of loyalty to their employer can significantly increase output and the quality of the product.
Also, most companies provide at least some training for their regular employees, but little, if any, for the disposable ones. The result often is that there are fewer well trained workers as increasing numbers of part-timers and temporaries come in for brief periods.
Like other union leaders, John Sweeney, president of the Service Employees International Union, is acutely aware that many companies are hiring more disposable workers to undercut wages and benefits paid to full-time union workers and to make things harder for union organizers.
Workers need job flexibility, but they also want decent incomes and access to health care, pensions and other benefits, he noted.
Positive results will not come soon out of last week’s hearing by the House subcommittee on employment chaired by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo). But it did call some attention to the enormous problems facing most of the nation’s roughly 25 million disposable workers, and that alone could spur much-needed action to help deal with those problems.
Labor Tries to Help Its Friend Willie Brown
Organized labor’s political influence is less than union leaders would like, but it’s a mistake to scoff at the important role unions play in the political arena.
Unions usually get some attention during presidential election campaigns, and they were credited with assuring Walter Mondale’s nomination as the Democratic candidate in 1984. When Ronald Reagan won the general election, however, their political muscle was ridiculed.
Presidential elections aside, unions around the country are involved in thousands of much smaller political battles that are generally ignored.
One of the more interesting current battles involves labor’s all-out support for the liberal Democratic majority in the California Assembly, with unions rallying behind Assembly Speaker Willie Brown as he fights off attacks by the conservative “Gang of Five” dissident Democrats who are trying to unseat him.
On April 21, the California AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education gave conditional election endorsements to the five, who had labor’s financial support in all of their past campaigns.
But two weeks ago, the latest endorsements were withdrawn after the five refused to meet the condition that they accept the decisions of the majority of the Assembly Democratic Caucus, which supports Brown.
Brown is a staunch supporter of almost all liberal-labor goals, but the majority behind those goals in the Assembly is tenuous. Example: a modest, but long overdue, measure raising the maximum jobless benefits from $166 to $186 a week passed in the Assembly on May 12 with exactly the required minimum of 41 votes, and all were cast by Democrats. The bill now goes to the Senate.
All of the Republicans, except for one abstainer, opposed giving more help to the unemployed. Also voting against the increase was one of the Gang of Five Democrats, Steve Peace of Chula Vista. Another, Rusty Areias of Los Banos, abstained.
John F. Henning, head of the state labor federation, said that by increasingly rejecting liberal measures and by constantly attacking Brown, the Gang of Five endangers all of labor’s legislative goals.
Unions alone do not have enough strength to defeat the gang of conservative Democrats. But if they work hard, they can be a decisive factor in defeating the five Democratic dissidents, aid the cause of workers and help save the embattled Brown.
