Part-time ranks falling, but slowly

Atlanta – For Velvet Bradley, a part-time job is a little like a tattered parachute — a hopeful notion that barely slows the fall.

Bradley, 43, works 10 to 25 hours a week at home, helping to run a small trade magazine. She sells ads and manages the database and website, but the pay is modest and the hours few — and she has been stymied trying to find full-time work since losing a managerial job.

In the past few months, she lost her car to bankruptcy and her home to foreclosure. "I'm just trying to keep the utilities on and the Internet going," said Bradley, who lives in Rockmart, Ga., 45 miles northwest of Atlanta. "It's been two years of this, and I have just had it."

About 26.3 million Americans work part-time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some want flexibility or are in school. Some are satisfied padding a partner's income.

But nearly four in 10 part-timers — 7.4 million — have taken part-time work only because they cannot find a full-time job, the BLS estimates, based on surveys it uses to measure unemployment.

The number of those involuntary part-timers rocketed to record levels as the recession deepened in 2008 and it slowly declined as growth restarted. The economy has slowly improved for nearly five years, renewing job growth and bringing down the jobless rate.

The number of part-timers who'd rather be full-time remains historically high, however: 4.7 percent of all jobs nationwide. That's down from the 2010 peak of 6 percent, but higher than other times since the early 1990s recession.

Federal Reserve economists recently reported that many service-sector companies are leaning more heavily on part-timers than during previous recoveries.

The result is a lopsided labor market in which many candidates jostle around nearly every opening — and companies can use part-time positions as a stopgap, knowing workers have little choice.

Whitney Cook, 29, of Ball Ground, Ga., left her job as a dispatcher in Alpharetta last summer when she was told city policy prohibits both her and her firefighter husband being on the city payroll.

"I've been trying to find something full-time and I am looking for anything that I'm qualified for — clerical, administrative, dispatching," she said. "It has been a struggle. Looking for a full-time job — that is my full-time job."

Cook is one semester shy of a degree in criminal justice. "There are a lot of jobs I think I'd be qualified for if I just had that piece of paper. It is frustrating."

There's been speculation and debate about whether the Affordable Care Act, which requires companies to offer health insurance once they reach a certain number of full-timers, has prodded employers to make more jobs part-time. But the number of part-timers, while still historically high, has continued to dwindle as the ACA takes effect.

The ACA also could boost part-time work as a voluntary choice by making health insurance available to people who don't want or need full-time work.

Whatever the ACA's effect, companies go with part-timers for a number of reasons. Hiring permanent staff can be costly — in screening, training and providing benefits. It is also a gamble: what if sales slow? Firms sometimes use part-timers as a stopgap until they are sure things are getting better.

And with so many job-seekers, companies figure a part-timer won't likely be hired away for a full-time job that pays better. Part-time jobs are also a way to see someone's work on the cheap, should the company want to hire full-time.

On the other hand, full-time workers can offer stability and better productivity. So companies generally shift from part-timers to permanent workers as the economy improves.

More than a third of firms questioned in a recent survey said they are hiring a combination of part-time and permanent employees, and an additional 7 percent say they are only adding part-timers, said Scott Smith, CEO of an Atlanta-based executive search firm.