The Plight of the Part-Timer
The proliferation of part-time work, including so-called contingency jobs, is playing an important role in facilitating the economic expansion now evident in the United States, but it is extracting an unacceptable price in terms of the denial of health insurance and pension benefits to many of the workers. That needs to be corrected.
Universal health insurance--available to all, not just to full-time workers--would appear to be the only equitable remedy. In the absence of that sort of program, other proposals create as many problems as they resolve. “A national system must soon be devised,” according to recent congressional testimony by Audrey Freedman, executive director of the Human Resources Program Group of the Conference Board, the New York-based economic and business research organization.
Freedman was defending the role of contingency workers in the increasing competitiveness of the American economy while recognizing the problems that are created both in the benefits denied and in the possible overall decline in investment in vocational training that could occur. At a minimum, according to Freedman’s calculations, self-employed and part-time workers now make up one-quarter of the work force. The effect on health insurance is evident in the fact that mostof the 37 million Americans who are without health insurance of any sort are working a substantial part of the time.
Some contingency workers receive benefits. Some major contractors for temporary workers offer their own benefit packages. Some employers provide part-time workers with access to group health insurance and pension benefits. But many do not. Nor will it be easy to devise an equitable remedy, according to Freedman.
Two models are under study, she reported. One would use the example of the construction unions that have established health and welfare trust funds to protect their workers, who move often from one job to another and have periods of unemployment. The other would mandate specific levels of benefits. Freedman was skeptical in her testimony that either of these could provide an equitable national program. She concluded that “employment linkage does not work well in a fast-moving economy.” In other words, health insurance needs to be separated from employment benefits and provided, in one way or another, to everyone, working and non-working. The new Massachusetts legislation, combining public and private resources, is an example of an innovative response to the problem.
This is the right time to focus on the issue of part-time employment. Legislative efforts to curtail the use of contingency workers could be disruptive of the economy. The nation cannot afford that. But neither can the nation afford the present situation in which some of the employers escape any responsibility for providing large numbers of their workers with minimum benefits while millions of people are left without the protection of health insurance and pension benefits.
