Part-time work
bj and jackie asked me to amplify on my comment that "In general, I’m less optimistic about part-time work, and more focused on improving the on-ramps for people who have taken time off from the workforce, but I think it’s worth working for both."
Having thought it about it more, it’s probably an overstatment to say that I’m "not optimistic" about part-time work. It works very well for some people, and I definitely think it’s worth pushing employers to consider part-time options for more jobs. But I don’t think it’s going to be the magic bullet that solves work-family conflict.
Let’s look at some types of part-time jobs:
- Jobs that are part-time because there’s really only 20 hours (or 24 hours or whatever) of work each week that needs to be done. The classic example of this is the small business that only needs a part-time bookkeeper. Adjunct professors who only teach a class or two probably fall into this category, too. If the number of hours of work available — and the salary paid — match what a worker is looking for, these can really be win-win setups.
- Jobs that really should be full-time, but the organization only has the money to pay for a part-time position. This is particularly common in the nonprofit sector, where workers often wind up working more hours than they’re paid for, since there’s always more work that need to be done, and they believe in the mission. This category also includes jobs that are actually full-time hours, but are officially classified as part-time so the employer can get away without providing health insurance or job security.
- Jobs that don’t require continuity of staffing from day to day. My guess is that the majority of part-time jobs in the US are in this category, mostly in the retail, food, and service sectors. These jobs are often highly flexible — for the employer. Many employers alter workers’ shifts from week to week, depending on projected traffic. In a few cases these are highly skilled, well-paid jobs — think speciality nurses — but most are low-skill, low-paid jobs. In either case, they rarely offer a career path.
- The oft-discussed rarely-found career-track professional part-time jobs. The jobs that Suzanne’s friends desperately want, but can’t find. I actually know a fair number of people in such jobs, but the trick is that they’re almost never advertised. The only way to get them is to work full-time, prove yourself to your employer, and then negotiate a part-time deal. And such deals often include an implicit or explicity promise to check email or come in on your "off" day in the event of a crisis.
The truth is that not all jobs can be done equally well by two part-time workers as by one full-time worker. Women want OBs who will stay with them until the baby comes, not ones that will walk out in the middle of labor because it’s the end of their shift. Even when a job can be divided, there’s often a significant cost in time spent passing information from one person to another. When there’s a labor shortage, sure, employers will accept these costs, but when there are equally qualified people lined up who are willing to work full-time (or more), they’re less likely to be flexible. And they’re more likely to be flexible with current workers, in whom they’ve already made a significant investment in training than they are with new hires.
My other concern with part-time work as a solution to work-family tensions is that it only addresses the work side of the issue, not the inequitable division of household responsibilities. And, as Rhona Mahoney points out, women in part-time jobs often wind up with the worst of both worlds: jobs that are unsatisfying, the vast majority of the household responsibilities, little free time, and little power to negotiate a better deal. Even if a woman has a highly satisfying part-time job, because she brings in the secondary income, she often has to give up her job if her husband’s job demands relocation, or if the work interferes with childcare.
August 12th, 2005 at 10:38 am
I generally agree with your comments here–although I did go to an ob/gyn practice where the doctor left at the shift change for both of my kids (I’m sure they wouldn’t have gone out if the baby was actually crowning at the time).
I think that the flip side of this is that the part-time work that was actually set up to take advantage of moms’ scheduling–I’m thinking particularly of school-related employment, like instructional aide, food service worker, and school secretary–tend to be jobs that are devalued by the employer when it comes to pay and benefits precisely because they know that there are so few other options for working moms who want to be able to work around their kids’ school schedule.
August 12th, 2005 at 12:35 pm
Weirdly enough, I was having part-time job problems BEFORE I had a child. I wanted time to work on my cartooning, but we also needed money, so I had to work at least part-time. Any jobs where the work actually sounded interesting to me were full time, and it was non-negotiable. It seems like if a job is interesting and fulfilling, employers can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to do it 40+ hours a week. So I worked at bookstores, which was moderatly cool, but it was still retail with all the crappiness that entails. Independent bookstores were flexible enough that I could be an assistant manager, part time. At stores like Borders, that wasn’t allowed, no matter how good I was a what I did.
Now that I have a child, I am dreading my work options. I’m trying to stay home as long as we can afford it, and trying to do as much writing/cartooning (yeah right) as I can squeeze into naptimes, thinking that maybe if I can come out of this with publishable work under my belt, I can have half a chance of turning that into the money-earning job. Dream on, I know.
August 12th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
IMHO the problem here is the disconnect between hours worked and your cost to your employer. Where the link is stronger — for example with retail work — more people work part-time. But where there are heavy sunk costs for any employee, companies will always be incented to drive people’s hours up.
It’s all about budgeting. In the US, the pricetag to an employer for any employee is roughly made up of the following:
Base salary +
Cost of benefits (primarily health insurance, but also sometimes retirement plans) +
Employer’s half of Social Security and Unemployment (FICA) and Medicare
There are probably other costs too, but for this generalization let’s stick with these. If an employee cuts their hours in half, only some of these line items come down with their hours. And the biggest culprit is health insurance. Clearly we all pay a part of our health insurance, but the employer also often pays part.
Example 1: employee + spouse + kids
Very Generous Employer’s portion: 10,000
Employee’s portion 2,500
Example 2: employee + spouse + kids
Not-So-Generous Employer’s portion: 6,500
Employee’s portion 6,000
This is a fixed cost and does not decrease when your hours decrease. It explains why many companies require you to work a certain number of hours a week to get health insurance. (At my current employer it’s 25 hours/week.)
What about taxes? Turns out your employer matches your social security (6.2% of income) and medicare payments (1.45% of income). But … for social security, the biggest line item, you’re only taxed on the first $90K you earn. (Note that all these numbers are accurate for 2005, but change year-to-year.) This gives additional incentive to pay one person more, versus paying two people more. You cough up more tax for two people, even if their combined base salary is identical to the combined salary one person.
So let’s run the numbers.
Total cost to employer of one employee making $120K/year
Base salary 120,000
(Non-generous employer’s) health insurance 6,500
Employer contribution to FICA 5,580
Employer contribution to Medicare 1,740
———
TOTAL 133,820
Total cost to employer of two part-time employees, each making $60K/year
Base salary 120,000
(Non-generous employer’s) health insurance 13,000
Employer contribution to FICA 7,440
Employer contribution to Medicare 1,740
———
TOTAL 141,180
That’s a difference of $8,360.
If you alter these calculations for the employer with generous health benefits, the difference rises to $11,860.
Hey — I’m not saying this is fair. It’s just reality. At one prior workplace people were discussing making the place more part-time friendly. One suggestion was pro-rating insurance coverage: making your co-pay reflect your hours worked. The idea was to allow managers to support part-time employees without gutting their budgets. It was fought tooth and nail by those who had wrangled a part-time gig with full insurance coverage. The part-time community split, frankly, between those who were tight with the CEO and everyone else. It was abandoned.
August 12th, 2005 at 1:25 pm
Thanks Jen. I thought about the health insurance issues, but thought the post was getting long enough. Your example is interesting — I don’t know that many employers that offer part-timers even pro-rated health insurance coverage, let alone the full package.
The cost of health insurance is definitely a major factor that pushes companies to require overtime rather than hiring more workers, since their health insurance costs don’t increase with overtime. I really don’t understand why more employers aren’t pushing for national health insurance.
August 12th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
I have a part-time gig that was part-time from the day I started, and even has included, over time, the ability for me to switch the number of hours I work based on my and my office’s needs. But I know how very, very, very, very rare this is. And my office does not have to hire someone to fill in the other part of my job; in fact, my workload doesn’t really shift when my hours do. It’s just that more (or less) gets done, depending on how much time I’m putting in. My (recently resigned) boss thought this was worthwhile because of what I bring to the table, but that’s not to say that it’s a common way of handling things. It was just that she knew she wouldn’t have been able to get me any other way.
I am currently, however, looking for new employment, and what I’m hoping to find this time is a full- or part-time gig…but one that’s telecommuting either in whole or in large part. And I’m finding that THAT is even more difficult to come by than the elusive part-time job, and that where it does exist, it’s either not in my industry, or is the sort of thing that evolves over time, like you were saying about part-timing. It’s gotten to the point where I’m just sending out resumes to jobs anywhere, whether or not they mention telecommuting in the ad, and then try to convince them to consider me nonetheless. It’s been, well, less than successful. Bleh.
August 12th, 2005 at 1:45 pm
I think everyone’s hitting the nail on the head.
The ideal part-time job is usually going to be one you craft for youself thru perseverance, proven efficiency, and a commitment to your boundaries. Employers have to be convinced these situations can work. I am living proof, having gone from my boss fretting over my proposed 35-hour work week (I’m an attorney) to finding it no big deal, as my work is done and the firm has not suffered. I flatter myself that I have made a small difference in one small organization by paving the way for the next working Mom or Dad who wants to be part-time at our firm.
I am convinced that the revolution is only going to happen one soldier at a time, but IT WILL HAPPEN if more parents like ourselves stay committed and spread the news.
August 12th, 2005 at 3:25 pm
http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2005/08/parttime_work.html#comments
8/12/05
I can talk about this, practically forever, because I can see it from so many different points of view at different times. But, I’ll try to limit myself to responding around Elizabeth’s specific divisions:
* Jobs that are part-time because there’s really only 20 hours (or 24 hours or whatever) of work each week that needs to be done.
In the case of adjuncts, as the job has currently become, a majority of adjuncts would probably argue with you about adjunct teaching being a good part-time job because there’s only that much work to do. These days, adjuncting is looking more like your retail example, where the employer uses adjuncting to justify low pay, no benefits, and no guarantees of continuing employement.
I do think there are jobs where there is only a limited amount of work to do, but I the way this has been dealt with, in most cases, is to use contractors — that way, you buy the hours you need, without having to pay the person for all hours, and people are unsatisfied with that, because it puts the employee in charge of their end of the business, which is risky.
In addition, jobs like adjunct teachng change the profession — in the old days, the 3 hours of teaching for a class were associated with a lot of other committments to the general well-being of the university, the students, and the future. Now, people are re-writing those jobs (from both the employers & employees end to include a more limited range of responsibilitties — teach your class and leave). Sometimes, part-time employment results in deprofessionalizing the profession, to the detriment of those who want to do the job as a profession, but also sometimes to the employee.
* Jobs that really should be full-time, but the organization only has the money to pay for a part-time position.
yup, yup, add to that jobs that are part time, because people want to do them enough that you can offer them part time pay for committing their souls to the job (internships/fellowships sometimes fall in this category).
* Jobs that don’t require continuity of staffing from day to day.
So there’s a growing trend to trying to re-define jobs where I do think there should be continuity of staffing from day to day as jobs that don’t. Nursing is a primary example of this (though you could also argue that retail service is better if there’s continuity). Female dominated medical practices are also leaning towards that now, and in a way that I as a patient don’t particularly like. Teaching is another one — I’ve now seen a number of articles where people say, OK, you say you pay me to teach the class, then I’m not going to do anything else. That changes teaching as a profession.
* The oft-discussed rarely-found career-track professional part-time jobs.
yup, right now, I think the only way to negotiate a job like this is to become indispensible and then request it, in the hopes that you will be accommodated; You can be indispensable because you’re just really really amazing, or you can be indispensable because you are willing to do a job that you’re overqualified for (which means you’ll recieve less pay), or because you’re willing to do a job that is generally undesirable.
I think part of the answer to part-time positions is that people have to come up with more practical and creative part-time solutions. Right now, I hear a lot of people complaining that they want 1) flexible hours 2) not too many hours (part-time) 3) rewarding work 4) control of their own schedule and 5) steady pay 6) good pay (that is 1/2 full time pay). Those are not all going to magically come together, beacuse each of them has a cost to the employer.
In terms of creative solutions, the things I’ve heard about that are interesting are things like part-time schedules where you have full responsiblity for 1/2 of the work, but the work is divided into independent work. For example, my doctor works part-time. In her case, this means she works 3 days/week, and accepts fewer patients. But, she was there on Saturday to delive my baby, and she stayed into the night to deliver the baby of another patient. That is, she commits to getting a certain job done, but negotiates to have fewer jobs to do. Another creative solution I read about in a book was a three reporters who agreed to work 8 month shifts. They were full time for their 8 months, but were free the other 4 months, and the 3 of them covered 2 jobs.
yikes. I can talk about this forever, huh?
bj
August 12th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
BTW, universities and governement employers sometimes offer part-time workers benefits, if they work at least 50% time. This is a little known perc of government employement. At my university, grants are charged a percent of salary for benefits. This % remains constant as part-time work arrangements are made, but the amount goes down proportionally with number of hours. So, allowing an employee to work part-time does not result in an increase in proportional benefits costs to the grant (of course, that might mean that the cost is being absorbed elsewhere, but given that a number of part-time employees at universities have health benefits from their partners employer, that’s not necessarily the case).
bj
August 15th, 2005 at 6:15 am
There’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over this, with the theme being ‘corporate culture has got to change’ and the idea being that, somehow, meaningful work for all can happen in bite-size chunks. I think Elizabeth and bj have it pretty much nailed, above. Not gonna happen culture-wide, and where it does happen, it’s generally a result of planning and flexibility on the part of the worker.
In our family, my wife works in a law practice which is in bare-knuckles competition with three or four others in a niche specialty area. They won’t get jobs if their workers aren’t there 60-70 hours a week when the case demands it. There are deadlines, research. You can’t split this work out, there are enormous coordination costs if you try and put more people into it, you are much more efficient if you have a more limited number of people work harder. I think this kind of law is just not going to happen for part-timers. I work a less demanding job which I can leave before 5 every day and relieve the baby-sitter, and this is how we keep things together for our kids. We have more money than we need, and less time with them than we or they would like, but it works well enough. We think it’s nearly impossible to combine two overdrive type careers with children – and particularly with more than one child. I think it’s going to be similar for researchers working flat out on new drug development, software engineers trying to keep their search engines competitive with all the others.
That said, if you have a law degree, I think a wills-and-divorces, or real estate title, or immigration practice, can be done on a part-time basis, without harm to the client. A software engineer can work for a firm which is trying to optimize an existing program for its internal conditions. The pharmacologist can maybe work for FDA on drug review, and be assigned two drugs a year instead of four.
August 15th, 2005 at 6:37 am
Great analysis, Elizabeth.
I find it interesting that so much of the US analysis on this point ends up at health care being the problem. Clearly it makes it worse, but we don’t have the same healthcare problem (at least related to employment) in Australia, and we still have exactly this issue.
I have a belief (maybe its just a wish!) that “The oft-discussed rarely-found career-track professional part-time jobs. ” could increase if employers tried a bit harder. It’s based on what may be a poor analogy. I have had great professional success in hiring people from what were “disadvantaged” groups at the time. When I lived in London, they were people from the north of the UK. Half the fund managers in London wouldn’t hire them through instinctive prejudice, so I had my pick of the best ones. Here in Australia, I’ve had some fantastic secretaries who were 2nd generation migrants (very smart women whose families didn’t believe in educating them, so they ended up as enormously effective secretaries).
The common thread is that by hiring someone who was not as highly valued by the general marketplace as they should be, I could get a great employee for a lower salary, or to work for one of the less prestigious firms.
Recently a friend of mine hired a part time HR manager for her company (too small to afford a full time one). She had an enormous choice of wonderful candidates and ended up with one with a perfect set of experience to fit the role (I wouldn’t have believed that mix of experience existed before she found the person who had it).
So that makes me think that an employer who can figure out how to employ people (of course mainly mothers) part time in an effective way that makes use of their real skill sets will, be able to get some real leverage out of the talent differential they are able to exploit.
The place this is most likely to happen is consulting firms (in the broad sense) – places which live off having lots of different pieces of work for different clients. But it won’t happen until the smaller birth rate really starts kicking in, and employers get serious about needing to be flexible to get and retain good staff.
I look with envy at a couple who are friends of mine who have managed to organise two part time jobs which pay well enough so that they both work three days a week and can live comfortably. I’m not sure if my husband would agree (as he’s the one not working right now), but that would be my ideal. So I’d like to make it work, I just haven’t figured out how yet.
August 15th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
My ob/gyn belongs to practice with five other female doctors, all of them are mothers (none have less than 2 children, most have 3 or 4), and they all work part-time. My doctor works three days a week, one of the partners with smaller children works two days a week, the others work three days a week as well, one four half-days during school hours so she can be home by 3:30. Additionally, they work “on-call” hours standard to most ob/gyn practices. Theirs is a wildly successful medical practice in Santa Monica, CA; almost all of my friends had their babies delivered by one of them. I never had an issue about seeing “my” doctor during my pregnancies, which wasn’t essential anyway since all of these women are terrific.
I have always felt that if women want to change the greater culture they are going to have to do it one job, one firm, one practice at a time. The company, which I now run, was started by a wonderful man who didn’t believe in sick-leave and vacation time. If you were sick, you were sick, if you had to take care of a sick kid, you stayed home and did it, if you wanted to go on three ten day vacations a year -fine. He left the office every day at five, it is standard and expected that we be available until 7pm in this business. He made himself available on the cell phone for the half-hour drive to get home, then he was unavailable during dinner and bath time with his daughter. After bath and a story, he would get back on the phone.
The reason for his largesse was that he trusted us all. Marty, a father of a young child himself, knew if we had to/wanted to be home to take care of a sick child that’s where we should be and that we would do some work, whatever the situations allowed, from home. We could take the long vacations because he knew we’d use common sense when it came time to when we took them and that again, if something came up, we’d take care of it from wherever we were. Give a little, take a little is how I always thought about it. I don’t care about having to work a little on vacations if I have the opportunity to take more of them. Now that I run our small company, that tradition continues. Marty’s method for running his business was a great example as I started my professional career, and a reason for the incredible loyalty I have to him (we’ve been working together for almost nine years).
For parents to get things to change we have to find innovative ways of working together and supporting each other. Of course, this model works well for people on the executive level, in order to get this system to work well, our assistants have to be available so that they can support us and provide a level of continuity. We do what we can to ease their schedule but the expense and reality of their job prohibits us from extending the same benefits to them; which in the end I don’t feel too guilty about since in this industry, being an assistant is a stepping stone on the way up, so they are inevitably 24 year old singles without family demands, who will only be in the position for a year or two –it is shocking and rare to find a “lifers” in these jobs.
August 17th, 2005 at 9:38 pm
I agree with everything bj says about adjuncting– I have found that there is not nearly enough of a correlation between the pay and the work required. Also, the incredible amount of adjuncts there are now has really changed the career-path of academics and how we progress towards a tenure-track job. Many employers regard more than a certain number of adjunct years to be a bad thing– it’s a system for suckers, and if you can’get out of it, you must not be qualified enough, you know?
No adjuncts I’ve ever heard of get any kind of benefits, either.
August 18th, 2005 at 6:45 am
Check ‘reader appreciation’ in Confessions of a Community College Dean – http://suburbdad.blogspot.com/ – very interesting perspective on adjuncting from a guy who hires:
“…I sometimes forget in my academic tunnel vision, that the ‘hiring for talent’ approach is actually the unusual one in the business world. Dilbert is all about the disconnect between talent and experience. The cliché about no experience without a job and no job without experience resonates because it captures the blind spot of hiring for experience. The way we hire full-time faculty in academia is unusual; the way we hire administrators is much closer to the business world. (And, ‘leadership crisis’ rhetoric notwithstanding, it wouldn’t be surprising to see future administrators come increasingly from the business world.)
As several commenters noted, in the hiring for talent model, longtime adjuncts are disadvantaged because they are presumed to have failed to show talent. A doctorate comes with a ‘sell-by’ date, at least in the humanities and social sciences. (Postdocs in the sciences are more complicated, and I don’t fully understand them.) Given the choice between a 20 year old minor leaguer and a 30 year old minor leaguer of identical stats, a general manager will go with the 20 year old; if a player is 30 and still hasn’t made the bigs, he won’t. The 20 year old at least has the potential.
The gender implications of this, I think, are obvious. If more women than men take critical time out for parental leave, more women will pass the ‘sell-by’ date than men. The fact that this clock largely coincides with the biological clock is a very dirty trick.”