SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : More Part-Time, but Not by Choice : Trends: More Americans who used to work full-time are forced to take fewer hours.

Part-time work is booming in America, which is good news for those who value flexibility or just want to pick up a few extra bucks.

But a more ominous trend is also on the upswing: part-time work that isn’t voluntary. In fact, more Americans who were used to full-time jobs are being forced to take lower-paying part-time work, usually without benefits.

Consider 34-year-old Julie Martinez, who supports a family of three. Until May, 1989, she worked 40 hours a week as a field supervisor in a Springfield, Mass., welfare office for $27,000 a year plus benefits, including crucial health insurance.

When the office closed, Martinez, who has a bachelor’s degree, could only find a part-time job: six days a week at $8.50 an hour, answering phones. Her work-week was 25 hours with no benefits. When Martinez sprained her back, she was let go. She’s been looking for a job since April.

“There is no full-time employment in my field,” she said.

Job-seekers such as Martinez are finding that their only choice may be part-time work. Thus they join the growing ranks of the underemployed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there were 5.7 million involuntary part-time workers in June, or about one out of four part-time workers.

Generally, economists interpret increases in involuntary part-time workers as a sign of tough economic times. For example, involuntary part-time employment peaked at 6.2 million workers during the 1982-83 recession. But what has also been noted by the experts is the steady rise during the 1980s of involuntary part-time workers. In that time, the number of involuntary part-time jobs increased about 18%.

This growth in part-time work is a “danger signal” for the U.S. economy, warns a recent study by the liberal Economic Policy Institute titled, “Short Hours, Short Shrift.”

“Most part-time jobs are low-wage, low-skill and dead-end jobs,” Chris Tilly, an assistant professor at the University of Lowell in Massachusetts, said in the study, which he wrote. “Part-time jobs have expanded since 1970, not because more workers want them, but because more employers realize the short-term savings in utilizing part-time work.”

Tilly added that involuntary part-time workers account for almost all the growth in part-time employment since 1970.

Of course, many people prefer to work part time, including parents who wish to spend more time with their children, students and older people. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there were 15.2 million people in 1990 who chose to work part time, or about one out of eight U.S. workers. This compares to 14.2 million voluntary part-timers in 1980.

These workers mesh nicely with the burgeoning retail and service industries that extended their hours to meet customer needs. Grocery and department stores, banks, credit card companies, catalogue marketers, mutual funds and health-care services all stay open longer; many have 24-hour-a-day telephone services, seven days a week. For these and other industries, part-timers are cost-efficient, offering flexibility to meet customer demand at peak hours without the expense of hiring a full-time person. Part-timers are also easier to lay off when times are slow.

United Parcel Service employs 90,000 part-time workers as package sorters. That’s more than half the UPS non-management staff, UPS spokesman Alan Caminit said.

“We used to have full-time sorters,” Caminit said. But UPS now hires mostly part-time sorters to meet increased workloads during certain times of day. UPS is one of the better part-time employers, paying up to $9 an hour plus some benefits.

But the growth of part-time jobs can be dismal if what you want is to work full time. Some experts see the steady rise in involuntary part-time work as alarming.

According to data from the General Accounting Office, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the EPI report, the involuntary part-time worker earns about 60% of a full-time worker’s wage. More than a third of these workers have no health insurance, and in many cases when insurance is provided, it excludes workers’ families.

Federal law requires an employer to make Social Security contributions and open pension plans to employees who work more than 1,000 hours a year (about 20 hours a week). But in 1988, only 10% of part-time workers were included in employer pension plans. Most states do not grant unemployment insurance benefits to part-time workers unless they earn more than $2,000 a year.

Moreover, part-timers are more likely to be women, and often are the sole wage-earner in the family. As a result, in 1988, 40% of the single-parent families headed by part-timers had incomes below the poverty level, and 26% receive public aid. Could this be, as one report termed it, a “Future of Lousy Jobs”?

Some see the growth of part-time work as part of a vast and inevitable change in the work force. Richard Belous, a senior economist with the National Planning Assn., a think tank, views the increase in part-time workers as one segment in what he calls a “contingent” work force of the self-employed, part-timers, business services and temporaries. During the 1980s, the number of contingent workers grew by about 14% to about 30 million--about a quarter of the total U.S. work force.

“It’s across the spectrum,” Belous explained. “It’s not just blue collar any more. It’s temporary accountants, temporary lawyers. There are more and more white-collar workers involved.”

And while Belous sees tremendous advantages to workers and industry in the increasingly flexible work force, he said the main problem is that the benefit system hasn’t kept pace. Fewer and fewer workers spend 25 or 30 years employed by one company. But as people change jobs, they usually lose their health insurance and pension.

“What we should be doing is making the social welfare system more flexible,” Belous said. He argues for portable pensions and prorated employee benefits, for example.

Meanwhile, unions are struggling to keep up with the changing American work force. “The labor movement never paid attention to a part-timer because our definition of work was 40 hours a week,” explained Elizabeth Engberg, a research analyst with the Service Employees International Union. “Part-timers were people who were used as strikebreakers. But with the growth of the service economy and women into the work force, unions have had to accommodate part-time work.”

To many unions, organizing contingent workers, especially in low-skill jobs, is extremely difficult. “We have members who clean hospitals and can’t get health insurance,” said Jono Shaffer, a representative for SEIU Local 399 in Los Angeles. “When we go to negotiate with them, they change contractors.”

Even if the contract does provide benefits, there can be problems. For instance, some janitors work on call and are asked to clean only a few days a week. In some months, they may not work the required 110 hours to qualify for health insurance benefits for the next month, said Shaffer, the local representative of the national SEIU “Justice for Janitors” campaign.

Marilyn Johnston has learned some hard truths about part-time work. Johnston was hired as a part-time waitress in a restaurant in Amherst, Mass. Some weeks she worked every day, or more than 40 hours a week. Other times she worked less. Her average weekly take-home pay was about $300 for six days’ work. As Johnston and others have discovered, there is no fixed definition of part-time; in many non-union jobs, the employer sets the hours.

Despite the long hours, Johnston’s waitress job provided no health insurance, sick pay or vacation. “You constantly lived in fear of doing something wrong,” she said. “If you ever called in sick you were fired.”

Johnston, 43, and her husband have six children. And although her husband has a full-time, $350-a-week job with an import company, neither of them has health insurance. “That’s our biggest problem,” she said. “We have to pay cash on the spot when we visit the dentist or the doctor.”

And because she lives near five colleges, there are lots of people willing to work part-time. “There’s such an abundance of students,” she said. “You’re so replaceable.”

She learned this the hard way: After 14 months on the job, she objected to a change in the restaurant’s policy on dividing tips. Johnston was promptly fired.