A distinguished group of presenters gathered at the Carnegie Endowment Center for International Peace Jan. 28 to participate in the fourth in a series of New Paradigm symposiums to address the issue "Contingent Work: Pseudo-Flexibility at the Price of Job Security?"
The program funded by the Ford Foundation and Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations had more than 130 in attendance -- scholars, advocates, Cornell students and alumni -- packing the Carnegie Endowment Center for International Peace in Washington, D.C, to debate the merits of the rapidly growing trend of contingent or nonstandard work and its impact on family, community and society.
Co-moderated by Betty Friedan, distinguished visiting professor at the ILR School's Institute for Women and Work, and Francine Moccio, the institute's director, panelists who were drawn from labor, academia and the private sector included: Elizabeth D. Moore, Partner, Labor and Employment Benefits Practice Group, of Nixon, Hargrave, Devans & Doyle LLP; Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, distinguished professor, sociology program, Graduate Center, City University of New York and author of a new book on professional women and part-time work; and Beth Schulman, international vice president and director, Professional Employees' Division of United Food and Commercial Workers.
Having successfully challenged conventional wisdom on the role of women as strictly mothers and wives in the classic Feminine Mystique, Friedan now has turned her attention to the issue of working mothers who may be trading off job security and employment protections as well as health and pension benefits for "flexible" jobs which enable them to balance work and family obligations better. Although contingent workers have always entered the labor market during times of unpredictable consumer demand, over the last quarter of the 20th century, there has been a radical shift from traditional employment, with employees working full-time for a single employer, to work defined as on-call, temporary, contract, day labor and regular part-time. Although contingent workers are 29.4 percent of the total work force, 34.4 percent of all women workers fall into that category, compared with 25.4 percent of working men. Since women are still responsible primarily for home and child care in addition to earning a wage, Friedan raised the need to establish a public dialogue on how contingent work affects both professional and low-income workers with regard to job security, access to health or pension benefits, social security and employment law protections, including the right to organize unions.
"Do contingent workers need a different form of protection?" Friedan asked the panelists. "What kind of protections? What are unions doing to protect these workers?"
Moore argued that enlightened employers represented by her firm view contingent work as providing workers with flexibility to move in and out of the work force -- thereby, fulfilling family or other life-course responsibilities, while employers can maintain a core of traditional, more permanent employees. But Moore also cautioned that there may be practices in which contingent workers who are actually full-time permanent employees have been "misclassified" as contingent. Moore also argued for stricter guidelines in employment law to define when a "temporary worker" is not temporary anymore: Is it one year or five? Lastly, she cautioned that contingent work, although sometimes satisfying the demands of both employer and worker, should not become a reservoir for poorly paid immigrant and other low-income workers.
Addressing the issue from the viewpoint of women in a higher income bracket, Epstein presented her research on women who work part time by choice. Although professional part-timers may be perceived as "having it all," Fuchs argued that even professional women who seek voluntarily part-time work face gender stereotypes, particularly in large corporate law firms that she studied where part-time work is often comprised of a 40 to 50 hour work week, instead of the usual 60 to 80 hour stint. Even among enlightened firms, Fuchs argued in rebuttal to Moore, women who ask for part-time work are not considered serious lawyers and men are considered "wimps." Fuchs said some of her male respondents stated, "If you want to be a mother, be a mother; if you want to be a lawyer, be a lawyer."
On the lower economic scale, Schulman described the situation of low-wage-earning men and women who have to string together two or three contingent jobs in order to survive. For these workers, she told the audience, health benefits, pension and social security are wishful thinking. Contingent workers have always been women and people of color, according to Schulman, who has led organizing drives of temporary workers in retail and hospitality for the United Food and Commercial Workers. Unions are bargaining for pro-rated full-time pay and benefits for part-timers, trying to discourage employers from using this group of workers as a cheap labor pool, which would also have a negative impact on wages and conditions of full-time employees.
Cornell Associate Professor Risa Lieberwitz, in her role as discussant, cautioned the audience that the layering of the work force into various tiers of contingent work is a "very anti-union position for employers to take." Contingent workers, according to Lieberwitz, are often second and third class citizens in the workplace, which in turn shapes their view as a collective for workplace change and makes them more vulnerable and harder to organize.
The growing income gap in the United States will be the topic of the next New Paradigm symposium March 25, "The Income Gap: Widening and Why?" at the Carnegie Endowment Center from 6 to 8 p.m. For more information, call (212) 340-2867 or e-mail bb11@cornell.edu.
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