Nice Flex, if You Can Get It

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 28, 1999 | by Timothy Burn

The number of workers opting for flextime continues to rise, much to the delight of highly skilled workers and much to the chagrin of labor leaders, including those at the AFL-CIO.

Job security is out and flexibility is in. In the ninth year of economic expansion, companies want a workforce that can adjust to the ebb and flow of the global marketplace. And more workers are demanding schedules that allow them to balance work and home life.

"For the last 10 years, there has been a whole new labor pool of people who, out of personal choice, want to work in these arrangements, so it is a perfect match," says Dianne Charness, president of Flextime Staff Inc., a 2-year-old company near Washington that helps place people in flexible work arrangements.

Flextime is one reason why Wall Street is running with the bulls and the nation's unemployment rate remains at a 30-year low, say experts. The trend, which began a decade ago, has meant that fewer Americans depend on one company for a lifelong career. A growing number are finding themselves in nontraditional work arrangements -- from part-time employees to independent contractors. Many find such arrangements liberating, claiming it allows them more time with family and more opportunity to build skills or switch careers.

But some workers fear that new employer-employee relationships will make it harder for them to earn a solid living. Since the Teamsters strike against United Parcel Service two years ago, several labor skirmishes have revolved around the hiring of part-time or contract workers who often are paid less and receive fewer benefits than traditional employees. Labor leaders have become alarmed at the increased reliance on contract workers in the manufacturing sector, a traditional power base for unions. Unionized construction workers increasingly must compete for employment with workers from contract-staffing companies.

This year, the AFL-CIO will unleash a massive public-relations campaign intended to cast the increased use of nontraditional employment as a cancerous trend that will leave workers with less control over their livelihoods. Labor leaders are seizing on that insecurity as a rallying cry to rebuild unions and restore their image as defenders of American families, not foes of economic progress.

"Many employers are abandoning their responsibility to workers and eliminating the traditional employer-employee relationship in order to avoid paying the cost of local, state and federal income taxes, Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and health benefits for their workers" says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. "We need to work hard to ensure that workers don't lose out on critical benefits and protections as corporations attempt to shift the cost of doing business onto their employees." Sweeney predicts that the issue will become a dominant theme in the 2000 elections.

The AFL-CIO will face a tough sell. A growing number of Americans think flexibility is giving them more, not less, control over their lives than the standard 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday schedule. Many are students, some are full-time mothers or fathers looking for extra income and others are are highly educated professionals who command high fees.

Take Kadah Stackhouse, for instance, a 42-year-old, married lawyer with two sons, ages 7 and 12. Stackhouse works through flextime staffing, which has placed her in a part-time position with a Washington law firm. Such arrangements are rare for lawyers, whose success largely is determined by hours billed. "I actually feel very comfortable knowing that there is a way for me to work part time as an attorney," says Stackhouse. "There are sometimes gaps between assignments, but my husband and I just work around it."

Stackhouse realizes how workers with less marketable skills would be wary of the notion of workplace flexibility. "I don't think the types of people most often in unions would have the level of security I as an attorney have" she says. "I can see how they would be opposed to this sort of work arrangement."

Last year at Bell Atlantic Corp., 73,000 telecommunications workers staged a two-day strike to protest the company's increased use of outside contractors. In New York, scores of waiters and waitresses are picketing the popular Rainbow Room restaurant, which recently replaced its wait staff with banquet waiters who are paid a flat fee and given no tips. But at Microsoft Corp., thousands of computer professionals working full time inside company headquarters in Redmond, Wash., are employed as "perma-temps" with their salaries and benefits paid by an outside staffing agency.

The fact is, the use of temporary and contract workers has skyrocketed this decade. About 12.6 million people, or one-tenth of the labor force, work for staffing companies or are classified as independent contractors, according to a November 1998 study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Another 1998 study by the National Association of Temporary and Staffing Services found nearly 3 million Americans work for staffing agencies, more than double the 1.15 million people in such arrangements in 1991. At the beginning of the decade, half of those jobs were office/clerical positions and one-quarter were industrial -- construction, trucking and plumbing. Now industrial jobs account for more than one-third of all temps.