New Orleans       It almost seems quaint to remember that some decades ago, the rise of “contingent” workers was seen as a big deal and an emerging crisis for US workers.  Countless studies, books, and ad hoc coalitions arrived to look at the problem.  These were workers essentially on-call without full-time schedules or benefits that broke the mold of the social contract forged in the post-war period that sought to build a middle class with stable, family-supporting wages and benefits.

That was then, but now this seems so old school with the rise of gig work and app employment.  Reportedly, there are now over 7 million app workers employed through the Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and similar platforms.  For all the hue and cry, most are still not even seen as employees so receive no benefits whether Social Security or anything else.  There have been efforts in a few places, like California, New York City, and elsewhere to change this, but in the main these are now permanently part-time workers as long as they ply the gig for work and wages.

In another example, there was a lot of hullabaloo about the utilization of unpaid interns in numerous sectors that were exploiting job-seeking, largely recent graduates by offering positions that came with hope, even if not promises, of future employment.  There has been an off-and-on crackdown on this, but as anything having to do with labor statistics and the workplace continues to be eviscerated by the current national administration, the notion that this is something that is likely to be counted or held accountable is diminished.  These kinds of programs induce employers to move from interns to part-time contract workers, rather than either regular part-time or the prospects of full-time work.  Job-desperate workers without equivalent market power are then stuck with devil-and-the-deep-blue choices.

What we may not fully understand is how this tendency to create a permanently part-time class of workers might be spreading to other employers in both the private and public sector.  Subcontracting and privatization of public employment by the advancing private service sector has also hollowed out significant job security in this area in the race to the bottom.  It’s hardly scientific, but many of us know people who are combining a series of part-time jobs and gigs in order to make a living and pay rent.  It seems to be spreading, rather than retreating.  For many years, our union has represented sanitation workers who handle the business end of garbage at the back of the truck’s hopper.  Even working full-time equivalent hours, these are frequently workers in city after city who are employed by temporary work companies, extracting a fee from the public employer to recruit and place workers on the trucks.  Such workers can unionize, as they have in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Dallas at different times, but it’s still rare.

We’ve also run into situations where permanent part-time work has been normalized, even when the actual schedule is full-time 40-hour-per-week work, and the classification belies reality.  It seems almost unimaginable that workers would be laboring side-by-side in the same workplaces doing the same work with one classified as full-time, working to a wage scale, and their co-worker classified as part-time but also working a full-time schedule, just at lower wages and benefits.  This is not temporary, but permanent, with workers in this situation not for months but years and years without any prospect of change.  This is Alice-in-Wonderland stuff, unreal and bizarre, but perhaps more common than we want to believe in a topsy-turvy world for workers.

There ought to be a law, but it’s not the post-Depression Fair Labor Standards Act.  FLSA simply mandates that every hour worked be paid, that breaks be given, and overtime compensated when worked.  With a recession on the horizon, exploitation of workers will become even more common and creative.  The gig and app industries have made a business model out of pretending that workers only want to work part-time.  This disease is becoming viral and now infecting stable employment by creating an underclass of permanently part-time workers.  We need a cure before this kind of predatory employment spreads any farther.