Payoffs, Drawbacks for Full-Time Part-Timers

After Barbara Loewenthal lost her job as a secretary last August, she went months without finding a new full-time position. So she came up with an emergency solution: She snared a pair of part-time telemarketing jobs.

Still, despite putting in 50 hours a week, Loewenthal was regarded as a part-timer by each of her employers and didn’t pick up health insurance or other full-time benefits. For the 52-year-old Loewenthal, a resident of Sun Valley, that was a critical problem because her husband needed costly knee surgery before he could return to work.

Those trying circumstances put Loewenthal in the grips of a largely unheralded workplace paradox: employees who are part-timers in name but full-timers in reality.

Untold millions of workers classified as part-timers by their bosses--including many in such industries as education, retailing and nursing--work close to or beyond normal full-time schedules.

So-called full-time part-timers fall into two basic groups. Some work for a single employer. In fact, the use by United Parcel Service of America of an estimated 10,000 full-time part-timers--employees who put in 35 or more hours a week but remain on a lower, part-time pay scale--has emerged as a major issue in the current strike against the company. The Teamsters union wants these workers, and as many other part-timers as possible, to be upgraded to full-time status.

In other cases, the full-time part-timers are people such as Loewenthal who string together two or three jobs. Many aren’t doing nearly as well financially as their counterparts at UPS, where part-timers get benefits and make about $10 an hour.

Often, part-timers provide needed flexibility for employers trying to cope with tough business competition. As such, the trend is an important management tool that arguably strengthens the overall U.S. economy. UPS and other employers generally call part-timers a necessity for dealing with the extra work that comes during peak hours of the day or seasons of the year.

At the same time, full-time part-time jobs frequently suit the lifestyles of students, parents with young children and elderly workers. Even many striking Teamsters at UPS concede that they would rather put in long hours on part-time status, in hopes of eventually landing full-time positions, than leave the package shipment company.

“I stay with them because I know I’ll have a good future if I wait it out,” said Mario Hernandez, a part-time UPS truck loader and driver at the company’s hub operation in Ontario.

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But it is a trend that critics fear could undercut productivity in the long-term, relegate some workers to permanent second-class status and inevitably worsen labor tensions.

Like other so-called contingent workers--including temps, independent contractors and contract employees--full-time part-timers generally miss out on the traditional benefits of full-time jobs. They are far less likely to get health insurance or pension plans, or to receive paid vacations and holidays.

And when it comes to pay, full-time part-timers and conventional part-timers appear to fare even worse than other contingent workers.

Federal statistics show that part-time hourly workers’ wages are 36% less, on average, than those of the full-time hourly employees.

Margaret Quan, 59, a community college history teacher in the Bay Area, knows firsthand the predicament facing full-time part-timers.

She will carry a full load of five classes when school resumes later this month, but only by grabbing jobs at three separate campuses.

Three days a week, in fact, she will have to drive about 45 minutes to her first teaching job, and then ride an hour and a half more to a second campus.

“I’m without the status, the benefits and the salary full-timers receive, and yet I must meet the same degree qualifications and I’m held to the same classroom standards,” she said.

Quan said she expects to earn about $20,000 this year from the three jobs, less than half what she’d make if she had a single full-time job at one of the community colleges.

Although the current economic boom has sped up the growth of full-time jobs over the last couple of years, the percentage of employment that is part-time generally has been creeping up since the 1960s. The long-term trend is driven by employers’ efforts to hold down costs and boost productivity.

Many companies find that part-timers can produce the same work for much lower cost, thus boosting profits.

What’s more, government statistics show that the number of people who work part time voluntarily is six times larger than those who do so because they lost, or can’t find, full-time work.

For instance, Andrew Morrow handled up to 40 hours a week, working nights and weekends, as a part-time supervisor at a Sav-On drugstore in Artesia, where he was employed until earlier this year.

“It worked out for me because I was a student,” explained Morrow, who today works full time for another company as a marketing specialist.

Most people who want full-time jobs have little trouble finding them, said Jeffrey McGuiness, president of the Labor Policy Assn., a group representing 250 major employers, including UPS.

“There are full-time jobs going begging. The unemployment rate is the lowest in more than two decades,” he said. “It’s just that a lot of people prefer to work part time.”

While worker advocates contend that full-time part-timers deserve full benefits, many economists dispute the notion that employers should be required to pick up the tab.

Marvin Kosters, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, cites the soaring unemployment and economic malaise in nations such as France and Germany, which have imposed such mandates on employers.

Still, beyond the drawbacks for individual workers, the trend carries broad social implications. Some labor leaders and other worker advocates fear that some full-time part-timers will find themselves permanently locked into a lower tier in the work force.

In the long run, the trend could also threaten further productivity gains because, as with other contingent workers, employers invest less in training in part-timers. And, some experts say, the trend could fuel further UPS-style labor tensions as part-timers increasingly resent the better status of full-timers.

Not only are employers on solid legal ground in paying part-timers less, but the law also actually gives employers an incentive to split full-time jobs into part-time work, said Eileen Appelbaum, associate research director of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

“You can’t pay a woman less because she’s a woman, but you can pay her less because she doesn’t work full time,” Appelbaum said.

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In one controversial case in 1993, Bank of America cut its payroll expenses by slashing the hours of many of its full-time tellers, enabling the company to eliminate most of their benefits.

Full-time part-timers often live with job insecurities, too. Loewenthal, after working 50-hour weeks for four months at her two jobs, recently lost one of them, a position at a telemarketing firm where she’d been paid $8 an hour.

In contrast, the UPS dispute includes workers like Ray Palacio of Riverside, who said that last year he was working 45 to 50 hours a week. Like other UPS part-timers, he gets overtime pay, full family health benefits, a 401(k) retirement plan and generous time-off provisions.

Not bad for a 25-year-old with no college, except for one frustration: Palacio is classified a part-timer by Atlanta-based UPS. And while his pay has risen from $8 to $12.50 per hour over 6 1/2 years on the job, veteran full-time drivers are averaging about $20.

Palacio loads and unloads packages at UPS’ Ontario facility from 3 to 6 a.m. He volunteers for longer hours afterward as an early-morning driver, handling late air shipments. Those tasks often stretch his workday to 10 or 11 hours, he said.

“When I joined, they said it would be three or four years before I could be a full-time driver. I’m still waiting,” Palacio said.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, at least 952,000 workers--and perhaps as many as 2 million--stay employed full time by stringing together part-time jobs. In an average week, an additional 896,000 people put in 35 or more hours on the job even though they say they ordinarily work only part-time hours. And many additional workers apparently are classified as full-timers by the government even though they are regarded as part-timers by their bosses.

If full-time part-timers get such a raw deal, why don’t they just quit and find new jobs?

Many full-time part-timers, and labor experts sympathetic to their cause, say that landing good full-time jobs is no simple matter, today’s low unemployment rate notwithstanding. They say that corporate cost-cutting has made it tough to secure good full-time jobs with benefits. So these workers often stay with their current employers, hanging on in hopes of eventually breaking into the full-time ranks.

Consider Hernandez, the UPS part-timer in Ontario who started with the company seven years ago. For most of the last 18 months, Hernandez said, he has worked as a truck loader and driver from 30 to 40 hours a week, while officially remaining on part-time status. He put in as many as 45 hours as a summer relief driver in June and July.

Hernandez, who is married and the father of two, wants to buy a house.

But he and his wife, a student and part-time waitress, have been turned down repeatedly by mortgage lenders because they lack secure, full-time employment.

Hernandez said he has considered quitting UPS many times. But like so many others, he figures that he eventually will nab a full-time driving job at a company he likes despite the problems.

Hernandez assumes that, because he’s completed only one year of college, there isn’t much of a chance that he could earn UPS-level wages anywhere else. At UPS, full-time drivers often earn about $50,000 a year; he now earns $11.41 an hour.

“If they settle this thing,” he said of the strike, “hopefully they’ll open more full-time positions, and it will let us continue our plans as a family.”