“(MoneyWatch) With job growth still weak in the U.S., another trend poses both an opportunity and a challenge for American workers: The explosion in temporary and part-time employment.
To be sure, such jobs can ameliorate the high unemployment that has plagued the economy since the 2008 financial crisis. Yet labor experts also say that the surge in what they refer to as “contingent” work signifies a historic shift away from the kind of long-term employment that workers once expected and that helped power the rise of the American middle class.
“What’s changed in the last 20 years is that there’s been an unraveling of job security in the labor market, as well as a diminishment of benefit packages and a deterioration of stable, reliable wages and promotion pathways,” said Katherine Stone, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and labor specialist. “There’s been a really fundamental shift in the nature of employment — it’s a sea change. Whether you’re talking about the expanded use of short-term employees, temporary workers, project workers, contractors or on-call workers, the use of workers who don’t have regular jobs has increased a lot.”
Two new studies highlight the rise of the temp economy. First, job-search company CareerBuilder reported Thursday that 40 percent of employers surveyed plan to hire temp workers in 2013. Of that number, 42 percent of those employers say they hope to make some of those workers permanent, full-time employees. CareerBuilder lists several job categories in which hiring of temps is growing, including sales representatives, office clerks, manufacturing assemblers, nurses, home health aides, truck drivers and office clerks.
Meanwhile, a study by consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas found that employers in February said they planned to cut more than 55,000 jobs, with over 21,000 of those slated to come from the financial services industry and a healthy dose from defense contractors and aerospace firms. That represented a 37 percent increase in planned layoffs over the same period last year.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines contingent employees as “those who do not have an implicit or explicit contract for ongoing employment.” By contrast, people who don’t continue working because they are, say, returning to school or retiring would not be considered contingent.
Estimates of the number of contingent workers in the U.S. can range widely, depending on how they are defined. But recent data suggest that roughly a third, and perhaps up to 40 percent, of American workers are in part-time, contract or other non-standard jobs. Recruiting firm MBO Partners projects that there will be 23 million contingent workers by 2017, up from roughly 17 million today.
That phenomenon presents problems for workers and society as a whole. Temp and other contingent jobs frequently mean lower wages than those earned by their permanent counterparts, and there are typically no health care or retirement benefits. Lower wages sap people’s purchasing power and limits personal consumption, which in turn discourages companies from hiring and slows economic growth…..”
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