Several years ago, to research the novel I was writing, I spent six months working in the warehouse of a big-box store. As a supporter of the Fight for $15, I expected my co-workers to be frustrated that starting pay at the store was just $12.25 an hour. In fact, I found them to be less concerned about the wage than about the irregular hours. The store, like much of the American retail sector, used just-in-time scheduling to track customer flow on an hourly basis and anticipate staffing needs at any given moment. My co-workers and I had no way to know how many hours of work we’d get—and thus how much money we’d earn—from week to week. We’d be scheduled for four hours one week and 30 the next.
For my co-workers, these fluctuating paychecks made it nearly impossible to get an auto loan or to be approved for a lease on an apartment, let alone to save money. Many didn’t have cars. They walked to work—in the middle of the night (our shift started at 4 a.m.), in the snow, in the rain. Even more maddening, in many states, social-safety-net programs such as Medicaid and food stamps require beneficiaries to document their work hours, meaning that if workers are, through no fault of their own, scheduled for too few hours in a given period, they could lose the very benefits that their lack of hours makes them need even more. Human-resources departments usually tell workers that the way to get more hours is to increase their availability—that is, if you want more hours at one job, you’re advised to promise to be available whenever you may be wanted. This makes it very hard to hold down a second job.
One of the great achievements of 20th-century American labor law was to set limits on how many hours of work an employer could demand from its employees. In recent years, however, working-class Americans have become susceptible to a different sort of exploitation. Instead of assigning employees too many hours, large corporations routinely give them too few, hiring multiple part-time staff in place of one full-time worker. These precarious, contingent workers aren’t entitled to benefits and are subject to inconsistent schedules in which the number of hours they work fluctuates dramatically from week to week. The result is an inversion of the situation that reformers confronted a century ago. For millions of American low-wage workers today, the problem is not overwork—it’s underwork.
Work as Americans understand it began in 1940, with a piece of New Deal legislation. Before then, Americans commonly worked 60 or 80 hours a week for little more than subsistence-level pay. Even the much-mythologized jobs in industry and manufacturing—the “good jobs” that Americans regret losing to globalization—consisted of dangerous, poverty-level work.
Then came the Fair Labor Standards Act. The FLSA established the federal minimum wage and limited child labor. And it stipulated that employers pay most nonmanagerial workers overtime, or time and a half, for all hours worked beyond 40 in a week. Combined with the rise of unionization, the FLSA changed work in fundamental ways. Americans began to believe something novel in human history: that if a person was willing to work, he or she should be able to make a decent living—maybe not a lavish one, but more than the kind of bare subsistence that had always been the lot of most human beings. When popular songs and movies use “9 to 5” as a shorthand for work, they are referring not to some natural phenomenon but to a way of life formalized by the FLSA.
Over the past 20 years, however, employers have figured out a clever way to circumvent the FLSA, taking advantage of the fact that the law sets a ceiling on work, but not a floor.
In 2005, The New York Times obtained a revealing memo written by a senior Walmart human-resources executive. The memo, drafted with advice from McKinsey consultants, recommended various ways of cutting costs. One of those suggestions would become particularly consequential: hiring more part-time workers. A year later, the Times revealed that Walmart planned to double the percentage of its workers who were part-time, from 20 percent of its workforce to 40 percent. Walmart is hardly unique in that regard. At Target, for example, where pay starts at $15 an hour, the median employee makes not $31,200, the annualized full-time equivalent, but $27,090, meaning that at least half of its employees are part-time. Kohl’s and TJX (the owner of such stores as T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods) also rely on predominantly part-time workforces.
The most obvious reason employers favor part-time labor is to avoid paying benefits. Starbucks, for example, talks up its generous benefits. But the median Starbucks worker made just $14,674 last year. For baristas, who earn a $15 minimum wage, this amounts to about 19 hours a week, just shy of the 20 hours a week that the company requires to be eligible for those benefits.
But an even bigger and less well-understood driver of the shift to part-time work is the rise of just-in-time scheduling. With a part-time workforce, made up of workers not guaranteed a set number of hours, employers can schedule the bare-minimum number of worker hours they expect to need on a given day. If business turns out to be brisker than expected, as it often does, they have a reserve of part-time workers to call on at the last minute.
The ability to schedule low and add more worker hours as needed saves employers money by freeing them from the necessity of offering, and paying for, 40 hours of work (or whatever number of hours it defines as full-time), week in and week out, even when business is slow. For the system to operate effectively, workers must be not merely part-time but also underscheduled—so desperate for more hours that they will reliably come in at the last minute.
Employers, and many economists, argue that this approach is efficient because it allows businesses to use only the number of worker hours they actually need. That is true, in the same sense that child labor and 80-hour workweeks were efficient during the original Gilded Age. The fact that what is most efficient for an employer might prevent workers from living stable, prosperous, healthy lives is why labor laws exist.
Employers and industry lobbyists also claim that they are merely responding to employee preference. The National Retail Federation, the country’s largest retail trade organization, argues that “flexibility and part-time options are essential” for many employees, such as “students pursuing a degree, working parents and teenagers.”
In fact, the available evidence suggests that most part-time workers would prefer to have stable full-time work. A survey of more than 6,000 Walmart employees conducted by the Center for Popular Democracy, a progressive advocacy group, found that 69 percent of part-time workers would like to be full-time. If Walmart wished to contest this claim, it could conduct its own survey. But the nation’s largest employers have not only chosen not to disclose precisely what percentage of their workforces are part-time; they also haven’t released any data to support their claim that many workers prefer these sorts of schedules.
Meanwhile, issues concerning hours are often among the first demands made by employees who form unions today. The platform of Target Workers Unite, for example, lists as its first demand not increased hourly pay or better benefits, but “more hours.” The second demand is “stable schedules.” The platform goes on to say, “Target workers can’t live decent lives when we have no fixed schedules or no guaranteed hours while we are encouraged to have open availability and be on call for any open last-minute shifts.”
The FLSA worked as well as it did because it dealt with the two components of income—wages and hours—whereas efforts to raise the minimum wage alone, however well-intended, deal with only half of the equation. But for all of its virtues, the FLSA never contemplated the problem of underwork.
Congress has the power to correct that oversight. It could require large employers to set schedules in advance, as some municipalities have done in recent years. It could remove some of the incentives for employing people part-time by either rewarding businesses for hiring full-time workers or penalizing them—such as by charging them the equivalent of benefits—for hiring part-time workers.
Another modification of the law would be to let hourly workers at big firms choose whether they want to work part- or full-time, the same way they choose to sign up for health insurance or change insurers during an annual window. The advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t involve the federal government putting its finger on the scale in favor of a particular type of employment. Instead, it allows employees to determine what type of schedule works best for them—something that should appeal to employers, who have spent years insisting that they’ve moved to part-time schedules because that’s what their employees want.
But none of these or any other reform ideas will gain any traction unless the issue of part-time work becomes a political issue, much as the minimum wage has. So far, the dismantling of “9 to 5”—of the kind of steady, predictable work it assumed—has gone largely unnoticed, except among low-wage workers themselves, who unfortunately tend to lack access to the levers of power.
One reason for this is the very success of the FLSA. It so effectively instilled the 40-hour workweek as the norm that even many economists habitually assume that workers choose whether they work full-time or part-time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates annual earnings in various sectors by multiplying the average reported hourly wage by 2,080, the number of hours you’d work if you worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. As a result, many earning statistics that are widely relied on for policy prescriptions have become more aspirational than reality-based.
A second reason is that professional-class workers tend to imagine part-time work as a mutually beneficial arrangement agreed on by employee and employer—say, for a mother who’d like to spend more time at home with her young children. For professional workers, this is what part-time work generally has been.
But the appeal of just-in-time scheduling for employers is not inherently limited to low-wage professions. Even those of us who don’t work in a retail or food-service environment could find that our jobs nevertheless can be made more “flexible”—organized around projects or workload rather than customer flow. This has happened already to some white-collar jobs. Consider higher education, where well-paid, full-time positions for professors have been replaced with tenuous, part-time adjunct gigs. Without a concerted policy response, more industries could be affected. You might think your boss needs you for 40 hours every week of the year. But are you sure?
The post How Part-Time Jobs Became a Trap appeared first on The Atlantic.
