Benefits Studied for Part-Time Workers : Labor: Clinton wants to see if health and pension protections can be extended to the growing ‘contingent employees’ work force.

The Clinton Administration is concerned that part-time workers, a rapidly growing group in America, are being denied the health, pension and vacation benefits available to most full-time employees, a Labor Department official told Congress on Tuesday.

As a result, the Administration will conduct an extensive review of labor laws and policies to see if traditional protections and benefits can be extended to such workers, said Delores L. Crockett, acting deputy director at the Women’s Bureau in the Labor Department.

“Workers with insecurity have little attachment or responsibility to their employers,” she told a hearing of the labor subcommittee of the Senate Labor Committee. “Productivity, quality of service, attendance, motivation and morale may be threatened when the tie between employer and employee is weakened.”

Increasingly referred to as “contingent workers,” these employees may include temporary workers hired for a day, week or month; part-time workers with jobs of less than 40 hours a week, and independent contractors.

Government figures show that part-time employees typically receive only 60% of the average hourly wages paid to full-time workers. Crockett noted that the nation’s largest private employer is Manpower, a temporary-help agency with 560,000 workers.

Many large companies have trimmed costs by cutting the ranks of full-time employees and replacing them with part-time or temporary workers. Firms sometimes abolish whole departments and have the work done by outside contractors, who hire temporary workers for lower pay and fewer benefits than received by the displaced workers.

Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), the subcommittee chairman, said the contingent workers are often denied important protections. For example, he noted that the new family medical leave act protects the jobs of workers who take time off to care for a spouse, child or parent during an illness, but it applies to those who work more than 25 hours a week.

According to Metzenbaum, the increase in U.S. workers who lack pension and health benefits “has alarming implications for working men and women in this country, for our standard of living and for our economy as a whole.”

“The more ‘contingent’ our work force becomes, the more dependent workers will be on government programs for income assistance, health care and retirement income,” he said, and called for suggestions for legislative remedies. “Ultimately, I am very concerned that if this trend continues, we will wake up one morning to find that the American dream has slipped away.”

The Labor Department has never made an official calculation of the size of the contingent labor force, although estimates range from 13% to 33% of all workers, Crockett said.

After its merger with Security Pacific Corp. last year, Bank of America forced many workers into temporary jobs with “no job security and little or no benefits,” Richard Delaney, an official with the Office and Professional Employees Union, told the subcommittee.

“These Bank of America workers would like to be here today, but cannot because of a very real and legitimate fear of retaliation and job loss for wanting to simply speak the truth about their own experience,” Delaney said.

“It is a sorry comment on the quality of the rights these workers ostensibly possess under federal labor law that they cannot even appear before this subcommittee without substantial risk of reprisal and job loss,” he said.

John Cammidge, a senior vice president of Bank of America who heads employee relations, said that much of the criticism of the bank is based on “misunderstanding or inaccurate information.”

The proportion of contingent workers had increased steadily even before the merger, he said. Contingent workers do not have benefits, but do have a pay scale 10% higher than regular employees, he said.

After the merger, the bank eliminated 3,600 jobs in retail branches. The bank has 65,000 workers in California, and 30% are contingent employees who work up to 20 hours a week, he said.