American Workers make Part-Time Living.

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... Fresh & Easy is just like the vast majority of large American retailers: most employees work part-time, with its stores changing many of their workers’ schedules week to week.
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“I like it. I’m a people person,” said Ms. Hardin, 50, who used to work as an office assistant at a construction company until times went bad.

But after nearly five years at Fresh & Easy, she remains a part-time worker despite her desire to work full-time. In fact, all 22 employees at her store are part-time except for the five managers.

She earns $10.90 an hour, and with workweeks averaging 28 hours, her yearly pay equals $16,500. “I can’t live on this,” said Ms. Hardin, who is single. “It’s almost impossible.”

While there have always been part-time workers, especially at restaurants and retailers, employers today rely on them far more than before as they seek to cut costs and align staffing to customer traffic. This trend has frustrated millions of Americans who want to work full-time, reducing their pay and benefits.

“Over the past two decades, many major retailers went from a quotient of 70 to 80 percent full-time to at least 70 percent part-time across the industry,” said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of the Strategic Resource Group, a retail consulting firm.

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“Many employers now schedule shifts as short as two or three hours, while historically they may have scheduled eight-hour shifts,” said David Ossip, founder of Dayforce, a producer of scheduling software used by chains like Aéropostale and Pier One Imports.

Some employers even ask workers to come in at the last minute, and the workers risk losing their jobs or being assigned fewer hours in the future if they are unavailable.

The widening use of part-timers has been a bane to many workers, pushing many into poverty and forcing some onto food stamps and Medicaid. And with work schedules that change week to week, workers can find it hard to arrange child care, attend college or hold a second job, according to interviews with more than 40 part-time workers.

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According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part-time workers in service jobs received average compensation of $10.92 an hour in June, which includes $8.90 in wages plus benefits of $2.02. Full-time workers in that sector averaged 57 percent more in total compensation — $17.18 an hour, made up of $12.25 in wages and $4.93 in benefits. Benefit costs are far lower for part-timers because, for example, just 21 percent of them are in employer-backed retirement plans, compared with 65 percent of full-timers.

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At the Jamba Juice shop at 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, along with the juice oranges and whirring blenders is another tool vital to the business: the Weather Channel.

The shop’s managers frequently look at the channel’s Web site and plug the temperature and rain forecast into the software they use to schedule employees.

“Weather has a big effect on our business,” said Nicole Rosser, Jamba’s New York district manager.

If the mercury is going to hit 95 the next day, for instance, the software will suggest scheduling more employees based on the historic increase in store traffic in hot weather. At the 53rd Street store, Ms. Rosser said, that can mean seven employees on the busy 11-to-2 shift, rather than the typical four or five.

Such powerful scheduling software, developed by companies like Dayforce and Kronos over the last decade, has been widely adopted by retail and restaurant chains. The Kronos program that Jamba bought in 2009 breaks down schedules into 15-minute increments. So if the lunchtime rush at a particular shop slows down at 1:45, the software may suggest cutting 15 minutes from the shift of an employee normally scheduled from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Karen Luey, Jamba’s chief financial officer, said the scheduling software “helped us take 400, 500 basis points out of our labor costs,” or 4 to 5 percentage points, a savings of millions of dollars a year.

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The rise of big-box retailers like Walmart, with their long operating hours and complex staffing needs, has contributed to the increase in part-timers.

Mr. Flickinger, the retail consultant, said when Walmart spread nationwide and opened hundreds of 24-hour stores in the 1990s, that created intense competitive pressures and prompted many retailers to copy the company’s cost-cutting practices, including its heavy reliance on part-timers.

Susan J. Lambert, an expert on part-time work and a professor of organizational theory at the University of Chicago, said the use of part-timers had also escalated because of the declining power of labor unions. “They set a standard for what a real job was — Monday through Friday with full-time hours,” she said. “We’ve moved away from that.”

Many corporations place store or restaurant managers under strict limits about what their payroll or employee hours can be each week, usually based on a formula tied to sales. These formulas usually give managers little flexibility to increase the hours assigned.

David Henson, a former assistant manager at a Walmart in Thief River Falls, Minn., said part-timers would sometimes come into his office on the brink of tears.

“A lot of them were single mothers. They said they weren’t earning enough to support their families,” he said. “They desperately wanted more hours, but we weren’t able to give them.”

Some, Mr. Henson said, were eager to take second jobs. But if they said they were unavailable during certain hours, then the managers and scheduling software would reduce their hours further, he said. Many workers concluded that it was simply not worth it.

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Mr. Flickinger, the retail consultant, said companies benefited from using many part-timers. “It’s almost like sharecropping — if you have a lot of farmers with small plots of land, they work very hard to produce in that limited amount of land,” he said. “Many part-time workers feel a real competition to work hard during their limited hours because they want to impress managers to give them more hours.”

Ms. Rosser, the Jamba Juice district manager, amplified on the advantages.

“You don’t want to work your team members for eight-hour shifts,” she said. “By the time they get to the second half of their shift, they don’t have the same energy and enthusiasm. We like to schedule people around four- to five-hour shifts so you can get the best out of them during that time.”

$16,500 a year? That would be a dream!

(Im not joking) until last year, i had not broken $15k a year. In 2006 which was my first full year of work, i made $9,870 and could not even qualify for medicaid.

The second is a minimum wage that enables a person working 40 hours per week to earn above the poverty line.

All that does is drive up inflation.

There are two legislative actions that should be taken to address these kinds of abuses.

The first is a deeming provision that will oblige employers to extend employment benefits to certain classes of part-time workers by reason of their tenure, and the overall size of the employer's labour force. If you are employing 28 part time employees at 3/4 of full time hours, then you could be supporting 21 full-time employees. In that circumstance I would disincentivize the use of part-time workers.

The second is a minimum wage that enables a person working 40 hours per week to earn above the poverty line.

Yes, and a good way to do that is levy a special tax for companies with a high percentage of employees on Medicaid, food stamps, etc.

any working class schlub who [with extreme dumbth] votes republican, deserves the wish sandwich s/he will surely get.

I disagree with using tax as a means of implementing a policy of non-exploitation.

I would far prefer a deeming provision that requires employers to provide part-time employees with things like employment benefits, security of tenure, minimum call hours and, of course, a living wage.

Better that the money winds up in the hands of consumers.

As a child of two entrepreneurs, that just sounds like efficiency and good business to me. As a business owner, why [i]wouldn't[i/] you use predictive software and a more flexible workforce to better tailor your labor usage to your actual needs, rather than paying extra people to stand around when you don't need them or being short a worker when someone calls in? Especially in the small retail and restaurant worlds, keeping labor costs under control is a real challenge, and failure to do so is a major cause of business failure. In the restaurant sector alone failure rate is around 90% within 3 years, so of course those businesses are going to use any and every edge they can get.

And that's why I prefer Tax penalties/incentives as opposed to laws or regulations to fix this problem.

If you need to wring that much out of your labor, do it with family members or teenagers or whatever, As long as your employees do not end up on food stamps or medicaid, that's fine.

However, if your starving/exploiting breadwinners to the point that they and their families are burdens on the state, you need to pay higher taxes, better wages, or GO OUT OF BUSINESS.

So, no jobs at all is preferable to jobs that don't meet your standards? Just out of curiosity, have you ever owned or operated a business, let alone started one? It's incredibly difficult, and all the red tape already in place just stacks the deck even more against success, which of course means less people are willing to take the risk and less jobs are created. There are large sectors of the economy where it just doesn't make any sense at all to employ people full time just because of the nature of the work (restaurants again come to mind), would you rather they all just closed up because they aren't able to offer the type of work you think they "should"?