Part-time trend hurting workers’ upward mobility

It’s a familiar story across America: Since the recession, people are working again, but their jobs aren’t good enough. Often, these people are forced to work part-time, and their employers won’t give them enough hours to make ends meet.

“What we hear in the field a lot is that people are hired with the assumption, if not promise, that they’ll get fulltime hours. And most weeks they don’t,” said Lonnie Golden, a Pennsylvania State University economics professor and the author of new research into part-time work published Monday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Most metrics suggest the U.S. economy has snapped back substantially since the

Many Americans sacrifice sleep, family time and entertainment to work multiple part-time jobs just to make ends meet.

recession. In November, the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent, a level unseen since August 2007. The economy has created an average of 180,000 jobs a month so far this year, far above what’s necessary to keep the unemployment rate stable.

But the quality, not the quantity, of the jobs is often in question.

Many Americans are still cobbling together a living with one or multiple part-time jobs. Overall, the number of people working part-time has risen 9.1 percent from 2002 to 2016, and now totals 26.4 million, government data cited by Golden show. But the number of people doing “involuntary” part-time work — that is, people who would like to work full-time but can’t find such work — is up 44.6 percent from 2002, to 6.4 million Americans.

Some 4.2 percent of American workers said they were involuntarily part-time in 2016 — a proportion that is down from the recession’s peak, but elevated compared with figures before the financial crisis.

The situation is acutest for low- and middle-income earners, especially women. It disproportionately affects African-Americans and Hispanics, who comprise 27.9 percent of workers, but 41.1 percent of involuntary part-time workers. Unsurprisingly, it’s severest in workplaces that have traditionally relied heavily on parttime staff, including retail stores, car dealerships, hotels and restaurants.

Involuntary part-time work takes a “massive” toll on American workers, the institute’s report says. Part-time jobs with unpredictable hours make it hard for workers to budget their finances and reduce the time the workers can spend with their families. These jobs often pay lower hourly wages, lack benefits such as health care or retirement savings, and don’t qualify for government benefits such as unemployment insurance.

It seems particularly unfair, because these are people who have shown they are willing and able to work, Golden said. Many Americans sacrifice sleep, family time and entertainment to work multiple parttime jobs, just to make ends meet.

Although the U.S. economy looks strong by many measures, data on involuntary part-time work shows what Golden refers to as the recovery’s “soft underbelly.” He sees signs of a bigger structural shift in how businesses are operating, toward relying more on part-time workers to provide flexibility and cut back payrolls.

“One of the responses of firms in a competitive industry can be to shift not only … labor cost to the employee, but the uncertainty of work to an employee. And that’s much more easily done with part-time jobs,” Golden said.

To help involuntarily part-time workers, Golden proposes laws to allow them to officially request more hours or be given more hours if they become available and that mandate pay for workers whose shifts are changed or canceled. He also advocates increasing part-time workers’ access to federal unemployment insurance.

The situation will improve, Golden said, if the U.S. economy continues to grow out of the recession. As the pool of unemployed people in the U.S. shrinks, employers will have more trouble finding workers and will likely be forced to shift some part-time jobs to full-time work to attract good people.

Recent government data suggests this is starting to happen. In November, the U-6 rate, a broad unemployment measure that includes parttime workers who would like to work full-time, fell to 9.3 percent. That was the lowest reading since April 2008, suggesting that the recovery is likely helping people who are underemployed, and unemployed, get back to work.

“We’re at a point in the recovery where the labor market has improved, but the last remnant or vestige of the recession is that there are more part-time jobs available. That’s what people take, but that’s not what they prefer,” Golden said. “It’s very encouraging that (the U-6 rate) is going down, and it can go down further if we address the underlying cause.”

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