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Part-Time Predicament

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T he public-relations frenzy surrounding the recent Teamsters strike against United Parcel Service made it impossible for the average observer to sort out the truth about the use of part-timers in the UPS work force. For one trying to be objective, it's not readily understandable why the company lost the public's backing on this issue, let alone the strike itself. One must credit the Teamsters, not long ago the pariah of the union movement and the object of massive government sanctions for egregious pension abuses and labor racketeering, with masterful PR tactics in succeeding to demonize UPS for "abusing" its part-time workers.

UPS also lost on the strike's second big issue -- pensions -- which is even more puzzling. What it was trying to do, it appears, was put its employees into a UPS plan, with richer benefits than provided by their current multiemployer program, which the new plan would replace. The current pension plan is run, in effect, by the Teamsters. It was that very type of pension structure, with that same management "participation," that the union's hierarchy had plundered in the early 'Seventies. Eventually, that led to the ouster of the trustees by the Labor Department and the IRS in a massive housecleaning of the union's Central States Pension Fund. One would have supposed that the UPS employees would see themselves as benefiting by a single-employer, company-sponsored pension plan designed and funded for them alone. Only the Teamsters Union, its pension officials and the employees of various weaker companies would seem to benefit from keeping UPS as a major contributor to the multiemployer plan. If UPS could lose the support of its striking employees on such a slam-dunk issue, its loss of the part-time issue is perhaps not surprising.

It is easy to paint UPS as keeping bread out of the mouths of infants by denying their parents the opportunity to earn a full week's wage. But that isn't a true picture. With the entry into the workplace of millions of students, heads of single-parent households and others who want the benefits of flexible schedules, the number of part-timers who wouldn't accept a full-time job easily outweighs the total of persons being denied such work (some estimates put the ratio as high as four-to-one). The most recent surveys of the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the part-time work force at 23.2 million in 1996, 18.3% of the total. That suggests that some 18 million workers don't want full-time work.

Most part-timers are in permanent jobs on their employers' regular payroll, and want it that way. But there is also a significant portion of part-timers holding what are called contingent jobs. As defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, these are positions not expected to last indefinitely, for reasons related to the hirer's business needs. There were more than six million such contingent jobs in February 1995 (when BLS last compiled the figures). The survey didn't indicate how many of them would be hired by their employers if the part-time option weren't available.

Declaration of Independents

In addition to the contingent group and, to some minor extent, overlapping it, is a very substantial force -- mostly part-time, largely off-payroll -- of independent contractors and self-employed persons. There are about eight million of them, according to the same survey. And they, together with other individuals whose work is arranged through an employment intermediary (contract workers, "temps" from Manpower , Kelly and the like) make up what Uncle Sam views as an alternative work force, comprising some 10 million workers. This group, added to the contingent work force (and netting out some two million, who are also alternative workers), amounts to 14 million people. Taking into consideration the small percentage of contingent workers whose part-time jobs could become full-time if legal or other pressures were placed on their employers, that would leave upward of 12 million contingent and alternative workers in this country who don't want or can't find full-time positions.

Then, adding, from the remaining 11.2 million of the original 23.2 million part-timers, a minimum of five million individuals who are on-payroll, permanent and content to be so, one comes to a total of 17 million, roughly 13.5% of the total work force.

Admittedly, hard data are difficult to come by here, because alternative work arrangements are often undetectable by statisticians and are subject to change, and because the categories of part-time, contingent and alternative aren't well-defined and morph into one another. But regardless of how one calculates the number of such individuals, they represent a formidable and growing bloc of our working population. We're in the midst of a fundamental change in the nature of the job market. And it's not the big, bad UPS's of the world that have brought this about.

An economist in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, studying its 1995 survey, concluded that "it does not seem that a large proportion of workers are involuntarily entering into contingent or alternative arrangements." Nine-to-five and the office desk no longer represent the invariable time and place of choice for many employers and workers. Even that auditor of the nation's business rectitude, the Internal Revenue Service, now employs a force of home-workers for some tasks. Technology, foreign competition, mergers, "downsizing," nonstandardized work scheduling, changing lifestyles, home economics (read "two-earner families"), all have played a role. Indeed, the BLS survey was conducted for the very reason that "the considerable flexibility ingrained in the United States labor market has produced a variety of employment arrangements."

Obviously, the ability to engage a work force on demand, when needed, is good for businesses of all sizes. It brings such benefits as reductions in the size of a company's permanent staff, moderating the effects of sales fluctuations, improving access to specialized skills, and enabling the delivery of product to market on time. Actually, these factors can be far more advantageous for small businesses than for the Fortune 1000. Indeed, in many cases, they're essential to these little firms' survival, because the small business is less able to commit itself to a permanent and fixed payroll, and to manage its personnel responsibilities (for example, paperwork, tax and other filings, and human-resources functions) than the large firm. If the overwhelming number of new jobs in this country is being created by small businesses, it only makes sense to create a climate in which they can start up and grow while off-loading some jobs that otherwise would overwhelm them, fiscally and physically. Part-time employees and leased employees are important ingredients of that.

Just in Time

At the same time, there's no reason to prevent Big Business from maximizing its competitiveness through similar practices. Some years ago, the Japanese "invention" called just-in-time found its way into America's factories as an innovative way to manage inventories. The contingent employment model is an adaptation of that to personnel practices. Obviously, one can't deal with human beings as if they were pieces of inventory. The unions have begun to introduce codes of conduct to address these concerns; and if the marketplace doesn't provide adequate safeguards, government surely will intervene to discourage businesses from yielding to adverse incentives. Even as there is a place for minimum wages and minimum pensions, there is certainly a place, in businesses of a certain size, for minimum, full-time staff levels and minimum benefits for part-time workers. But where business needs flexible or supplemental staffing, that too should be accommodated. Even critics of part-time hiring acknowledge that. What is needed is the striking of a balance.

What unions could better do for their part-time members is to improve their benefits, rather than trying to force their conversion to full-timers. There is a substantial gap between the wages and fringe benefits that part- and full-timers receive at many companies. A drive for stronger benefits could be a win-win formula, likely to achieve support from the public and on Capitol Hill, while also directly benefiting the unions themselves by making them more attractive to part-timers, who typically are resistant to union organizing.

If, on the other hand, the part-time issue is politicized by labor unions and a stigma is attached to contingent and alternative work arrangements generally, lawmakers eager to curry labor's favor won't pass laws to accommodate such work patterns. Worse, existing labor and tax rules will be stiffened, to make it more difficult to hire independent contractors or temporary employees. This was vividly demonstrated in the recent skirmishing in Congress leading up to passage of the Taxpayer Relief and Balanced Budget Acts. By the time the tussling ended, a "safe harbor" that was to allow treatment of certain employees as if they were independent contractors was scrapped by the legislative conferees at the 11th hour, under pressure from the unions.

If what is generally perceived as a clear Teamsters win were to lead to further bargaining successes on the part-time and contingent staffing issues, the result could be jobs migrating to foreign shores, some domestic firms failing, many small businesses never even getting started. That would be a sorry legacy of the United Parcel settlement.

ALVIN D. LURIE, a former IRS official, is an attorney in Larchmont, N.Y.