Two decades ago, I would lecture about the hiring trend I called "McDonaldization" of the workforce. That is, conversion of formerly full-time career jobs into part-time non-career jobs. I gave it that name because fast food restaurants were pioneers in part-time staffing.
Once sales clerks in our department stores worked forty or perhaps forty-eight hour weeks. They earned sick leave and vacation time, accrued pensions, and retired after forty years with Sears or Penneys, getting the proverbial gold watch.
That sounds preposterous today; now only management have full-time jobs in retail. The same is largely true among hospitality employers: restaurants, bars, hotels and motels, resorts.
I told my students that reducing other jobs to less-than-full-time - everything from bank teller to programmer - was only a matter of time. Few believed me; sadly, I've been proven correct, indeed prescient. See a RealClearPolitics article by the Washington Post's Robert Samuelson on the topic.
Much work we cannot ship overseas to be done in third world sweatshops is being done by part-timers, temporaries, and contract workers. People like the now-infamous Edward Snowden who worked for the U.S. National Security Agency via the subcontractor Booz Allen Hamilton, with catastrophic results.
The uncertainty facing employers from Obamacare requirements has further exacerbated the staffing trend, when it hasn't kept firms from hiring altogether.
