Big employers in the US are increasingly using part-time and temporary workers to hold down labor costs, according to the latest figures from the Labor Department. In a trend that has been accelerated over the last two years, corporations are moving to phase out full time positions and create a workforce earning far lower wages and fewer, if any, benefits that can be hired and fired at will.
In November there were a total of 9.2 million “involuntarily part-time” workers in the US. After adding an average of 28,000 new jobs over the previous few months, temporary help services created 39,500 jobs in November, more than any other sector of the economy. Temporary agency jobs accounted for 80 percent of the 50,000 jobs added by private employers last month.
Since the beginning of the year, employers have added a net 307,000 temporary workers, more than a quarter (26.2 percent) of the 1.17 million private sector jobs added in total, according to a December 19 article in the New York Times. In the comparable period after the recession of the early 1990s, only 10.9 percent of the private sector jobs added were temporary, and after the downturn earlier this decade, just 7.1 percent were temporary.
In a recent interview with the job search web site monster.com, Melanie Holmes, vice president of staffing agency Manpower, said, “The nature of work is changing. Because of technology, we’re able to work anywhere, at any time, and not just from home or from Starbucks, but from India. That’s changed the way some employers look for employees. They recognize they’re always going to want to have a contingent workforce and to staff up or down to meet their needs.”
The shift to low-paid and part-time workers is part of a fundamental change in class relations in the US. America’s corporate and financial elite has used the economic crisis—created by their own making—to strip workers of long-standing income and job protections and drastically increase productivity and exploitation. As a result, US corporations are making record profits and are sitting on huge financial reserves. Rather than hiring they are using the cash hoards to pay out bigger executive bonuses, boost share values through stock buybacks and to prepare a new wave of mergers and acquisitions.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/temp-d21.shtml