Part-time work: not just for mothers
The New York Times ran a bunch of letters in response to Judith Warner’s column on the Pew report about work-family preferences.
Of the 5 letters:
- 2 pointed out that many older workers also want part-time work as an alternative to working full-time or retiring all the way;
- 2 noted that fathers might want to work part-time as well to spend more time with their families; and
- 1 made Joan Williams’ argument that discriminatory treatment of part-time workers should be treated as sex discrimination under a disparate impact argument.
So it’s not like we’re out on the radical fringe here. But while the Times will publish these letters, none of this ever seems to make it into the articles themselves.
On a related note, the New America Foundation is busily arguing for removing responsibility for health insurance and retirement from employers, and creating what they call a "citizen-based social contract." One of their arguments is that if everyone has access to these benefits independent of their jobs, more people will be able to work part-time and spend more time with their families, develop small businesses on the side, etc. I do think it would help, but not as much as they suggest. As Jennifer has pointed out here before, Australia does have national health insurance, and they have many of the same issues over part-time jobs that we do here in the US.
July 27th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Unfortunately, I think they sell more newspapers and magazines if they make something like part-time work sound more radical or challenging or controversial than it really is.
I’ve been a part-time worker for 7 years. Yes, I do trade money for flexibility. No, part-time doesn’t pay as well as full-time. No, you don’t get the same amount of benefits (although at my company, you get health insurance if you work at least 30 hours/week.) But I still choose to do it because for now, I value my time more than money. (and I have the luxury of being married to someone who supplies my health insurance.) I’ve kept a challenging, professional job. I’ve just done it part-time.
I live in the Midwest. Normally, we are behind the coasts in any sort of social trends. But I think we are way out ahead in this one. In my city, anyway, there are lots of part-time opportunities – and happy part-time workers.
July 27th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
I would love to read a study on the views of part-time work from young people graduating college. I have heard stories about companies changing their hiring practices due to how young people value a full-filling social life as important as money. These topics tend to focus on women with children, but I suspect there are alot of young people that want to balance their lives even if they are childless.
July 29th, 2007 at 7:55 am
‘disparate impact’ – there’s a great way to make sure nobody hires a part-timer ever again. You have your whole cost of maintaining a person on the payroll, training, keeping people ‘in the loop’ on what’s going on in the work place. A part-timer is going to be worth less to the organization, in general, per hour worked, than a full-timer. And it’s going to be more and more true as you go up the complexity/professional continuum from Target check-out to, say, policy analyst at a Washington Think Tank. Elizabeth, you talked at http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2007/07/part-time-work.html about your own choices to stay full time in part because you think you would lose effectiveness if you don’t. Part time is good, it’s a great option for families, but if there were a mandate that part time work conditions and wages had to be exactly the same as full time, it doesn’t let people who want to be part-timers bid for the work with lower wages, and many bosses who had to actually make a profit would back off from offering the option.
July 30th, 2007 at 11:14 am
I think that a part-time worker _can_ be “worth” less to a company than a full time worker. Benefits plays a big role in that, and taking benefits (both pension & health) out of the system would reduce the cost differential. But the management costs (of coordinating, educating, and integrating) would still cost something for part time work.
But, what’s also true is that part-time employment of skilled individuals can mean access to skills that you couldn’t afford to pay for full time. A model for this kind of part-time work exists in free-lancing/being an independent contractor. I think to integrate part time work we really need to be thinking of all of these models.
Taking our “full-time” employment model and just changing one part of it (the requirement for full-time work) isn’t going to work, to produce part-time options.
bj
July 30th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Part-time is a boon to smaller organizations where you simply don’t need someone to do every job full-time. I think of my own mid-sized IT shop, where we really can’t keep a DBA busy for 40 hours a week. It’s a perfect situation for a part-timer. Ditto for our events planners.
And as everyone has been saying forever, as soon as men started asking for part-time it suddenly became OK. I shouldn’t be amazed by this but it is still breathtaking, how the cynics amongst us were so resolutely proven correct. (Trying not to get depressed about it!)
August 1st, 2007 at 2:04 am
(I guess I am feeling comment-ish tonight.) RE: part-time work and benefits: I am 1/2 time (as a “Senior Internal Consultant” at a company with around 3,000 employees in 4 states) and I get 1/2 of everything: pay, PTO accrual & benefits allowance. So our benefits take a fair chunk out of my paycheck, but it is a rich plan and it is a reason I am still there.
It seems to me that a lot of parents I know work part-time (more women for sure – but some dads, too); it could be location (Seattle) – lots of tech companies, which I think tend to be more flexible.