Breitbart says that only 47% of Americans have a full time job. According to the Department of Labor, there are 116 million Americans working full time. The actual picture is much bleaker than that. There are about 4.5 million Federal employees. There are also 19 million local and state full time government employees. Subtracting those from the employment, and we see that there are only 93 million Americans working full time in the private sector. That's right- only about 1/3 of America is working to support the other 2/3.
This is being caused by the high cost of government mandated benefits for full time employees, in my opinion. A full time employee gets FMLA leave, free health insurance, and many other costly perks that part time employees do not. These benefits have pushed the cost of hiring full time employees past a critical tipping point, where the cost of hiring, training, and managing multiple part time employees is less than the cost of paying expensive perks and benefits. It is now cheaper to hire 2 people at 24 hours a week than it is to hire one person at 40 hours per week.
This will only accelerate the fall that I have been talking about for years. Hang on, this crash is going to hurt.
It's a pet theory of mine that the never ending increases in demands from the fed.gov for full time employees will destroy the practice of full time employment. As it is, we see many places cutting back the number of hours part time workers put in so they don't run afoul of the 30 hour mandate, and companies like the one I work for not hiring entry level employees. We hire contract employees or workers from temp. agencies, and if they put in a good six months, they usually get an offer.
ReplyDeleteIt will take a long time for a big company like ours (around 10,000 employees) but I can see smaller, growing companies getting an advantage by hiring contract employees for most of their work.
My aunt works 7 days a week as a gardening contractor for Home Depot. The problem is that she only works 4 hours a day, for a 28 hour workweek. If anything, the benefits required for full time workers have made her life worse, not better.
ReplyDeleteI think that this practice will become more widespread.