Part-Time Recession

By Ron Stodghill

Paulette Lind cobbled together a pretty good living by working two jobs. By day, the 49-year-old single mom worked full time in a local hospital, drawing blood samples from patients awaiting surgery. That paycheck went to cover the mortgage on her modest Minneapolis, Minn., home. To pay other bills--including parochial-school tuition for daughter Amy, 13--Lind worked 21 hours a week at Davanni's Pizza, a supplier of Northwest Airlines' domestic in-flight meals, where she earned $9 an hour.

But with air travel slumping since Sept. 11, Northwest jettisoned meal service. Lind lost her part-time job, as did her 15-year-old son Eric, who had also put in a few hours each week at Davanni's. Lind hasn't pulled Amy out of parochial school yet, but she isn't optimistic about landing another well-paying second job in this weak economy. "Things are now real slim," she says.

Remember that joke a few years back, in which President Clinton boasts at a dinner about the 8 million new jobs he has created, and a waiter cracks, "Yeah, and I'm working four of them"? Well, it's no laughing matter anymore. In recent years, more Americans have been working part time. Some are moonlighting for extra money. Others put two or three part-time jobs together. Still others prefer part-time work because it gives them more time to care for children or elderly parents. But now that hard times have hit, the part-timers are getting hit harder than most.

Some 20 million part-time workers, or 16% of the work force, are employed part time, and most are ineligible for unemployment benefits, which are targeted at full-time workers. Making matters worse, the plight of unemployed part-time workers is virtually invisible--they aren't counted in the statistics, which showed an unemployment rate of 4.9% in September. A related problem is the lack of coverage for so-called short-timers who lose their full-time jobs but don't qualify for unemployment checks because they haven't been on the job long enough or earned enough money.

The eligibility rules for jobless benefits simply haven't been adapted to the growth in the part-time and highly mobile work force. "There is a huge group falling through the cracks for whom there is no safety net today," said House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri. "They're not getting the $400 or $600 a month in unemployment benefits, much less any help on their health care."

The leading measure in Congress to address rising unemployment--President Bush's pitch for an extra $3 billion to extend benefits in some states for eligible workers to 39 weeks from 26--offers no help to part-timers or short-timers. In early October a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives introduced legislation to extend jobless benefits to more low-wage and part-time workers, but so far it has attracted little support.

Some economists are worried that the hardship suffered by these invisible jobless could worsen the economic slump as they cut back their spending on everything from clothing to car payments. "Any stimulus package that doesn't reach these workers who are buffeted by the recent changes needs to be altered so that it does," says Jared Bernstein, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a union-backed think tank in Washington.

Unemployment insurance is financed through federal and state employer payroll taxes. State agencies take the applications and administer the payments--and their rules vary widely. Consider the experience of Stewart, 36, a Chicagoan who asked that his last name not be used. He had been working full time as an inspector in a steel-forging company for five months when he was laid off on Sept. 26. Illinois pays jobless benefits only to those who have worked full time, continuously, for 12 months before they lose their jobs. So even though Stewart and his employer paid into the unemployment-insurance fund every week that he worked, he can't draw anything out of it. A single parent, Stewart is supporting his 17-year-old daughter by digging into his savings while he looks for work. But he finds that "there just aren't any jobs out there anymore."

In the recent years of plentiful work, Congress and most states have cut spending and tightened eligibility requirements on such traditional safety-net programs as unemployment insurance, welfare, Medicaid and food stamps. The General Accounting Office warned in a report to Congress last year that the dearth of unemployment benefits for part-time and low-wage workers could hit particularly hard at women who have recently left welfare for the workplace. "In the event of an economic downturn," the report stated, "many low-wage workers...will be unable to qualify for unemployment-insurance benefits."

Rules governing benefits for laid-off workers vary widely among the states. In Alabama--which along with Mississippi provides the lowest weekly benefits in the country ($190)--to be eligible for unemployment benefits, a worker must have earned $9,120 in the first four of the last five quarters he or she worked, the so-called base period. A worker in Massachusetts, which offers the highest weekly benefit in the country ($477), must have earned at least $14,310 in the total base period. Restrictions vary so much that in Florida, only 26% of the state's unemployed in 2000 received unemployment insurance, compared with 75% in Connecticut.

Advocates for reform of this system say the question now facing Congress is whether it's willing to labor full time on a plan to help those who depend on part-time work.

--Reported by Melissa August/Washington, Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis and Maggie Sieger/Chicago

With reporting by Melissa August/Washington, Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis and Maggie Sieger/Chicago