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| Involuntary part time public workers rally outside Monroe County Office Building, Rochester, NY. Photo: Lynn Miller, CSEA © 2010 |
By Ove Overmyer
President, CSEA City of Rochester Library Workers Local
828 Unit 7420
Federal/Local PAL
August 3, 2014
An employer shift
to involuntary part time work ultimately benefits no one. Our nation's employers need to re-invest full time in the American worker.
Rochester, NY-- The easiest way to destroy the American
Dream for average folks is take away a worker's opportunity of bettering their
station in life. This has become the new normal and the common conundrum for
every involuntary part time worker in America. I know firsthand-- I am one of
them.
And for the record, you can not equate or compare having more than one part time job at a
time with a full time career with benefits-- it’s not the same.
When balancing public sector fiscal budgets, federal,
state and local municipalities often struggle with all the decisions related to
extending the pay and benefits of its public workers who deliver the vital
services our communities so desperately need. The effect of the recession that
officially began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009 on government budgets
increased the interest of policy makers to alter the compensation of all its
public sector employees so it could meet the shortfall demand.
When revenues began to shrink in early 2008, so did the
backbone of our lawmakers across the country. Rather than find creative
solutions to our most difficult challenges, more often partisan bickering and
an inability to effectively deal with the people’s business ruled the day.
In 2014, New York State’s inability to offer the City of
Rochester the appropriate AIM money is pathetic and wrong on so many levels.
More specifically, New York State is mandated to fund New York State libraries
according to the NYS constitution, which is linked with census figures and
other data. Library funding for New York State should be $102M, but lawmakers
continue to ignore constitutional standards by coming up more than $20M short
every year for the last decade.
Most informed folks know many of the cost expenditures local
municipalities’ face are mandated or out of their control-- inflation being one
of them. What elected officials and bureaucrats can control, however, is labor
costs and whether or not to offer public workers a living wage, fair pay and
benefits in the form of full time employment. These decisions are mostly
negotiated through the collective bargaining process-- but workers and the
unions who represent them have had little influence over the creation and
proliferation of involuntary part time work to offset the revenue losses since
the mid 2000’s.
This simple truth is highlighted and no more evident than
right here at my own workplace, the Rochester (NY) Public Library. Since 2005,
we have seen a huge drop in full time workers. Part time workers outnumber full
time workers at eleven branch libraries including Central Library, 345-99. And,
I think it’s important we put a human face on these jobs-- the typical profile
of the average part time City of Rochester library worker is female, person of
color, age 45-54 taking care of a multigenerational family with an income no
greater than $14K or $15K annually. We have been doing more with less not only
on the job, but at home as well.
Almost 70 percent of these part time library workers I
represent revealed in a 2013 negotiations survey that the library work is their
only source of income because of factors beyond their control-- the cost of
child care being the number one obstacle.
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| photo: Ove Overmyer, © 2010 |
While we CSEA part time workers have been able to
successfully negotiate a cost of living increase over time with some holiday
and paid leave, the collective bargaining agreement only offers health
insurance and related premium benefits at 100 percent cost to the worker. It is
not cost effective for most part time workers to buy into the health plan the
City offers-- they would absolutely be spending their whole paycheck on the
premiums. Workers and their families are left to their own device to make ends
meet-- more than 65 percent of these workers receive some sort of public
assistance in the form of SNAP or Medicaid. Not providing health insurance
means that ailing workers often rely on emergency room treatment or Medicaid,
treatment scenarios in which the costs are largely covered by the public anyway
adding to the taxpayer burden. The advent of the ACA has also proven to be
somewhat burdensome to part time workers—many are now spending more out of
pocket money on healthcare premiums while other household necessities get the short
shrift.
And today, municipal budget directors and bureaucrats
think making full time work part time is their quick fix solution-- it may
balance the budget this year, but in the bigger picture it does nothing to grow
the economy and improve the quality of life for the residents we ultimately
serve. This path is not sustainable for the long term-- and we need to fix the problem now. Replacing full time jobs with part time workers is attractive for
government entities because they can reduce the amount of employee years to
slow the growth of any negotiated benefit, decrease spending on pension
contributions and effectively deal with skyrocketing healthcare costs over
time. Public employers are simply shifting our societal problems onto other
entities-- whether it’s Medicaid, Medicare or benevolent nonprofits like
Catholic Charities, Inc. There is a point of diminishing returns when you do
not offer public employees a living wage with benefits-- and these decisions
will have long lasting ill consequences for our local communities in years to
come. To say we cannot simply afford to invest in our public services, which is
our workforce, is shortsighted, counterintuitive and extremely unproductive.
Consider the data
According to the latest BLS statistics, June 2014 marked
52 consecutive months of job growth. However, the number of full-time jobs
actually fell in June by more than 530,000 compared with May. Total jobs
increased only because part time jobs grew by about 800,000.
When you really look at the latest BLS jobs report, the
data tells an entirely different story about what has slowed our recovery from
the Great Recession back in 2007-09. It’s the trend and rise of public and
private sector employers converting full time professional career opportunities
to part time or temporary status (with no or limited benefits). Most troubling
of all, the number of people who want to work full time but can find only part
time work shot up from 4.6 million in 2007 to 7.5 million last month. This
involuntary part time employment explains, statistically, the entire increase
in part time jobs in the last six-plus years.
According to NYT Pulitzer Prize winning author David Cay
Johnston, had we maintained the 2007 ratio of full time to part time jobs
today, we would have 2.5 million more full time jobs and 2.5 million fewer part
time jobs. He says we would still need another roughly 7 million jobs to
fulfill all the demand people have for work. The shift to part time work took
place before Obama’s policies had any effect and well before Congress passed
the ACA in March 2010.
Income inequality is still growing and average incomes are
down for every income class
It might have taken a near-historic recession for many
Americans to notice our country's rapidly rising levels of income inequality,
but the gap between rich and poor has finally gone mainstream, with bloggers,
economists and policymakers of all stripes spouting theories on why we should
or shouldn't care.
And while the debate continues over cause and consequence,
that central claim has proven unshakable: the void between the wealth of
America's richest and poorest is widening, and few signs show any indication of
it slowing anytime soon.
Time and time again, leading economic specialists report
that America will not survive without a strong middle-class economy. When you
strip average folks of their spending power, it leads to strained public
services, social unrest, crime, high unemployment and a poor quality of life
for the majority of taxpaying citizens. People die-- and families suffer.
In the private sector, the ability to buy goods and
services-- what economists call aggregate demand-- is down because average
incomes are down. Tax returns show that average real income declined in
10 of the 12 tax years since 2000. In fact, average income is down for every
income class, including the very top, compared with either 2000 or 2007.
Put America back to full time work
The City of Rochester, The County of Monroe (NY), New York
State and the federal government have a long-term problem of too few full time
and too many part time jobs. According to Johnston, solving that problem is actually
simple. All we would need to do is increase aggregate demand like investing
immediately in fixing up our crumbling and decaying infrastructure and create
living wage careers to get the job done.
Increasing family incomes would certainly increase demand
for goods and services, which in turn would alleviate human suffering and boost
unemployment levels. Don’t believe the argument that employers are cutting
worker hours because of Obamacare-- the facts and data of the matter simply do
not support that hypothesis. First, the data show clearly that the rise of part
time work, especially forced part time, precedes any impact from the 2010
Affordable Care Act, which, again, did not take effect until this year.
If we want more living wage jobs both now and long-term, lawmakers
must hear from the American people. The message must be clear-- invest public
dollars in America’s public services for a better future for everyone--
especially in our roads, bridges and other infrastructure, the commonwealth
property on which private wealth creation depends. Also, every concerned
citizen should be screaming from the rooftops telling lawmakers to stop cutting
basic research budgets and start pouring money into laboratory work, where
trained workers far outnumber available jobs.
Another solution to some of these social problems would be to establish a fair
and more equitable tax system. All reliable data shows that the rich simply do
not pay their fair share.
Conclusion
Whether or not you believe systems of government have the
ability to improve the lives of an average American, you cannot argue the fact
as a citizen and taxpayer, the United States is truly a better place because of
the educational advancements, technology, public resources and services we all
share. But as we travel down this road together, when we witness high poverty
rates, lack of opportunity, hunger and an ever-increasing income inequality
quotient it should be seen for what it truly is-- landmines of an ill society.
The good news here these conditions are man-made and preventable.
Additionally, I am making this argument because there is
also a data-driven academic reason for justifying a move away from private and public
sector part time work-- it just makes a tremendous amount of economic and fiscal
sense to create spending power for America’s poor and working class and in the
long term, taxpayers and our families will eventually benefit from this shift
in job status.
Jobs have no justice if employers move full time jobs to
involuntary part time work with limited or no benefits. While greed, poverty
and suffering proliferates and income inequality grows, the increase of part
time, low wage and temporary jobs becoming the “in thing” and permanent full
time living wage careers are nowhere to be seen is definitely the wrong course
for America.
And, without the political will to empower our own
citizenry, it doesn’t look like there’s a surefire route to go from one to the
other either-- posing serious risks to our nation’s economic vitality, to
creating stronger communities, healthier families, improving worker morale and
stimulating corporate growth.
If this action is not remedied in the near future, the
vast majority of today’s part time worker families will probably spend their
golden years in relatively unstable destitution and fully dependent on social
services altogether. It seems to me that if we re-invest and empower the
American worker with a living wage today in 2014, it would go a long way to
creating a healthier, more productive world class American way of life. And,
maybe even some of us can actually achieve the American Dream before we depart
this life as we know it.
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Resources:
July 31, 2014
By Tom Raum
May 19, 2014 6:33 AM
EDT
Aljazeera:
July 31, 2014 6:00AM
ET
By David Cay Johnston
