Part-Time, Temporary : No-Frills Jobs: More Work for Less

Susan Wildermuth of Seattle is snared between two problems: an inability to find a permanent job and a seriously dislocated jaw.

The problems are intimately connected. Although she works, she does not earn enough to pay the medical costs of repairing her jaw. And because her job as a computer graphics specialist at the University of Washington is temporary, she does not have medical insurance.

“I have $120 in the bank,” Wildermuth said, “and other complications with my jaw are coming on.”

She is one of a growing number--at least 20 million at last count--of “contingency workers”--part-timers, temporaries and those on call to work when there is work to be done.

To employers they are a blessing. At a time when efficiency and productivity determine survival in the competitive global economy, they allow American business the much-needed flexibility to bring workers on board when they are needed but to leave them at home--without pay--when they are not.

‘Throw-Away’ Labor

For the workers themselves, however, the blessing is, at best, mixed. Many, like Wildermuth, have neither medical insurance nor pension benefits. Some see themselves as “throw-away workers” trapped in dead-end jobs.

Unions are struggling to organize what some of them call “phantom workers,” and Congress is considering legislation that would guarantee them pensions and health insurance.

For most workers, contingency jobs are better than no employment at all, but sometimes not much better.

Mike Bellas of Ambridge, Pa., has spent the last three years in a series of temporary jobs: construction worker, laborer, liquor store clerk. Now he is on call for Marriott Corp.’s In-Flite Kitchen, based at the nearby Pittsburgh airport. He prepares food, takes inventory, sweeps the floor.

On-Call Employment

The company often telephones him on short notice to fill in for someone who is sick or on vacation. “I was afraid of leaving the house for fear of missing a call,” Bellas said. “I felt like a prisoner in my own home.”

Now he rents a telephone beeper for $19 a month and calls In-Flite whenever it goes off. “I take my work clothes with me wherever I go,” he said.

Of all the nation’s contingency workers, the most visible are the secretaries and others who get their jobs through temporary agencies, yet this group actually represents only a fraction of the total.

Night-time and Sunday store clerks, office-cleaning crews, burger fryers at fast-food restaurants and “data entry clerks” who sit before computer screens in thousands of offices nationwide all help to make up this growing category of workers. The federal government, whose employment practices have earned it the nickname “the last plantation,” employs 329,000 people in other than full-time, permanent jobs.

Part-time workers alone--those who work fewer than 35 hours a week--number 19.6 million, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Almost 5 million of them say they would rather work full time.

Then there are unknown millions of temporary workers. Most temporary arrangements end after six months because, after that, federal law generally requires that employers offer such people the same insurance and pension benefits as full-time employees.

Workers supplied through temporary agencies such as Manpower Inc. number about 1 million, government officials say, but they do not know how many other temporaries are hired directly--a group that several company officials said is increasing rapidly.

“I guess we pioneered temporary help in Boston, but many more companies are beginning to do it,” said Edie Evans, recruiting coordinator with John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. “I think it’s another wave of the future.”

Contingency workers are predominantly female and either very young or very old. Two-thirds of part-time workers are women, according to the labor bureau, and nearly two-thirds of the men who work part time are between 16 and 24 years old or over 65.

A disproportionate number of the nation’s contingency workers--about 80% of them--are in the service sector and often work nights and weekends.

“In goods-producing industries, where operations generally are conducted in one eight-hour shift or more, the usefulness of part-time workers is limited,” Thomas J. Nardone, an economist with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said. In manufacturing, many contingency workers are kept on call for occasions when large orders demand stepped-up production.

The growing trend to contingency hiring reflects what Columbia University economist Eli Ginzberg calls U.S. industry’s effort “to make fewer and fewer long-term commitments. Employers are getting smarter.”

Paul Andrisani, director of Temple University’s Center for Labor and Human Resources, said reliance on temporary workers eases the pain of adjustment when times are bad. “It helps companies keep their costs down,” he said.

There are other benefits. John Hancock Mutual Life has 60 temporary workers in a clerical pool, and Evans said the pool arrangement helps her weed out unsuitable workers before the company has made a permanent commitment to them. “This way, we don’t have to worry that we’re getting a bad hire,” Evans said.

Beyond that, the savings are enormous. Hancock is able to hire temporary workers without the expense of fringe benefits--mostly pension and health insurance coverage--that add 22% to a typical employee’s annual salary.

Nationwide, Ginzberg said, such benefits amount to an average of one-third of an employee’s salary. “That makes it increasingly important for employers who want to watch their costs not to take on full-time employees if they can avoid it,” he said.

Part-timers and temporaries also are typically paid less than others. The average hourly wage of part-time workers was $4.42 in 1987, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while full-time hourly workers earned an average of $7.43.

A number of factors--the high proportion of women and young people in the part-time and temporary work force and the disproportionate number of low-paying, service-sector jobs filled by contingency workers--are in part responsible for the difference in pay. Even so, companies often can get part-time and temporary workers for less than they must pay their full-time, long-term employees.

What is money in the bank for companies is no boon to their workers, however.

“Employers are cutting their costs at the expense of these employees,” said Deborah Meyer, associate director of the Cleveland-based 9 to 5, a national organization of working women. “These cheaper jobs may help the employers’ bottom lines, but they are devastating the employees because of low pay and lack of benefits.”

Many contingency workers are “underemployed and underpaid,” said Lawrence Mishel, research director at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organization. “This creates unnecessary division and animosity” in the workplace.

Private Insurance Costly

Some contingency workers buy their own health insurance--often without benefit of the group rates available to others through the workplace.

Bellas, who earns $5 an hour when he is called in to the In-Flite Kitchen at the Pittsburgh airport, pays not only $19 a month for his telephone beeper but also $77 a month for medical insurance. He is 33, and saves on rent by living with his parents. “If it wasn’t for them,” he said, “I don’t know what I’d do.”

Yvonne Johnson of Washington dropped her health plan, obtained through an agency for temporary workers such as herself, because it was “relatively expensive”--$80 a month. “I’ve been playing roulette for three years,” said Johnson, who works at temporary clerical jobs.

In Milwaukee, Donna Mae Rudofski, after four years as a part-time employee of Sears, Roebuck, expects to be offered company coverage in July for the first time. She is delighted at the prospect.

“It’s a day-to-day affair, being without medical insurance,” she said. “You just go on and say, ‘I won’t let this overwhelm me.’ ”

Many contingency workers report a pervasive alienation from their full-time, permanent colleagues. It shows up in everything from lack of a regular work space to being shunned in the company cafeteria.

Many Feel Left Out

“Nine times out of 10, you go into an office as a stranger and you leave as a stranger,” said Wildermuth, the University of Washington computer graphics specialist. Moreover, she said: “Temporaries are left out of staff meetings. You’re kind of like a tool, not a part of the organization.”

But Donn Wells, the university’s director of staff personnel, finds that not all the workers in the clerical pool--about 50 on a typical day--are so unhappy. “Generally, it’s a high-morale group,” he said. “For one thing, many of them are happy to be working at all.”

And, for some contingency employees, there is no better way to work. College students and others who are covered by their families’ insurance policies--the number of workers in this situation is unknown--are among them.

In Boston, Janet Lynn Gillis works as a temporary receptionist for John Hancock. “I like doing it,” said Gillis, a sophomore at Framingham State College. “I plan to do this until I graduate.”

Temporary jobs appeal to more experienced workers as well. Johnson, whose temporary clerical assignments take her all over Washington, had become fed up after 15 years in the regimented career of a government secretary.

Looking for Security

“At first,” she said, “I was wanting freedom and flexibility.” But those virtues have begun to pale. “Now I want more security in my work,” she said. “I want more control over what I do.”

The trend toward contingency hiring is alarming to organized labor. “It’s awfully tough to organize people with no stable base,” said John Laughlin of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.

The danger ahead, Laughlin said, is that the expanding number of employees without benefits will contaminate the work force, undercut wages and erode other gains that unions have made. “If that pattern is set, it’ll be tough to go back,” he said.

John Sweeney, president of the 850,000-member Service Employees International Union, told a recent congressional hearing that the lack of benefits expenses for part-timers “gives employers a powerful incentive to turn full-time jobs into part-time jobs.”

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) said that only 16% of part-time employees are covered by employer-based medical insurance, and only 27% are covered by employer pension plans. “Part-time work itself is not good or bad,” Schroeder said, “but I am disturbed by the trend I see at work that is creating a second tier of employees largely made up of women.”

Bill in Congress

She is sponsoring legislation that would require pro-rated pension and medical coverage of part-time employees. (For an employee who worked 40% of a given period, for example, the employer would have to pay 40% of the usual employer contribution to the company insurance plan.)

Although Schroeder’s bill has almost no chance of enactment this year, many economists believe its time will come. “We have to come face to face with this problem, just as we did with Social Security and unemployment insurance,” said Andrisani of Temple University.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, Susan Wildermuth hopes her part-time job will lead to full-time employment--and that her health will hold up until then.

The system, Wildermuth complained, discourages people in her situation from working at all. If she were unemployed, she said, she would quickly become poor enough to qualify for coverage under the Medicaid program.

“You get help,” she said, “if you’re absolutely poor and absolutely desolate.”