Single mother Tabitha Paice needed part-time work to help her balance parental responsibilities and school work, while still earning a living to help support her three children.
United Parcel Service needs part-time workers–thousands of them–to sort, load and unload trucks and aircraft at its package centers around the country.
To get workers like Paice, Atlanta-based UPS last fall began offering many of its 150,000 part-time workers upfront college tuition grants, along with a plan to help pay off student loans for workers. The longer they stay, the more gets paid off.
It’s a good deal, says Paice, 32, who’s earning a computer science degree at Northwestern Business College in Hickory Hills and hopes to stick with Big Brown once she graduates.
“My schedule is so tight through the week I have no time for anything else. That’s why I like working part-time,” said Paice. She doesn’t mind that her shift runs from 4 a.m. to 8 or 9 a.m.
Her school-age children like it as well, now that Mom can take time to go with them on field trips. And the company’s tuition aid package kept Paice’s out-of-pocket school costs last semester to a minimum. “I ended up paying just $168,” she said. “I thought it was wonderful.”
UPS isn’t merely being generous, though. The company relies almost exclusively on part-timers in its package-sorting centers. But the same shortage that has hit employers of full-time labor has hobbled industries like UPS that depend on part-timers.
So some employers are looking for new ways to recruit and retain part-timers. People who prefer part-time work may profit from the situation.
Part-time work itself is growing, says Hewitt Associates, the Lincolnshire benefits consulting firm. In a survey last year of 349 employers, 39 percent reported that the ratio of part-timers to full-time employees had grown in the last five years.
And despite some criticism of the trend, many people embrace part-time work to help better balance work and family responsibilities, said Hewitt work-life consultant Jon Van Cleve. Some employers have actually expanded their use of part-timers because they want to keep workers who want shorter hours, he said.
Employers also like the flexibility part-timers allow in scheduling and staffing, especially outside the 9-to-5 business day, said Van Cleve.
The shortage of part-timers mirrors that of full-time job seekers, he said, and employers are responding. Hewitt’s survey found that part-timers who work at least 30 hours a week are more likely to get such traditional full-time perks as medical, dental, life and disability insurance than a similar survey found four years earlier.
It’s not all rosy for part-timers, though. Hewitt’s 1999 survey actually found that fewer part-timers who worked less than 30 hours a week got insurance benefits than in 1995, creating a growing “benefits gap” between them and full-timers–probably because of ballooning insurance costs, Van Cleve said.
Other fringe benefits are rising for all part-timers, however, including paid vacation, paid sick leave and flexible benefits accounts, which can cover services including medical care and child care.
“Like every other company, we have definitely felt the labor crunch,” said UPS spokeswoman Paula Fulford. The situation “has forced us and many other companies to be much more creative and innovative in our recruiting practices and our retention practices.”
Chief among those is the company’s new Earn and Learn program targeted at college students like Paice. Students can qualify for up to $3,000 a year in direct tuition payments. Workers who stick around can also get loans of up to $4,000 a year, with UPS paying off half the balance for those who stay a year, 75 percent for those who stay two years and more for those who stay longer.
By helping the company keep workers, “the program pays for itself,” Fulford said. And it’s a good deal for students who stay, she added. Most who stick around for three or four years rise to become supervisors.
At Minneapolis-based Target Corp., well over half of the company’s Target discount store unit employees are part-time, said Steve Kenady, Midwest regional human resources director. Without them, he said, Target couldn’t operate its nearly 80-hour-a-week schedule for shoppers.
For nearly five years, Target has offered paid vacations to part-timers after 12 months and subsidized health-care benefits after 18 months, Kenady said. More recently, however, the store has tried harder to make its culture more attractive to part-timers.
That can mean, for instance, excusing a half dozen teenage workers so they can attend their high school prom, rather than saying no and losing them for good. It also means making it easier for workers who want to work fewer than 20 hours a week.
“It used to be that people would not get job offers unless they had a minimum number of hours they were available,” Kenady said. Not so much any more. “It’s really incumbent on us to fit the work around the availability of people.”
Target also grades supervisors and managers on how well they keep employees, and the results go into the performance review that helps determine their raises, Kenady said.
To help staff its ubiquitous coffee shops, Seattle-based Starbuck’s has offered part-timers benefits for a decade, with the company paying 75 percent of the cost for employees and half the cost for dependents, said Julie Root, Starbuck’s Midwest human resources manager. Employees qualify after having worked 160 hours.
More recently, though, Starbuck’s has been recruiting more aggressively on college campuses, in local community groups and with ads on radio or on the Internet. The company also has instituted bonuses for employees who refer new workers.
Part-time work isn’t limited to hourly employees. MRA, a Wisconsin and Illinois employers association, uses large numbers of part-time professionals to aid member companies in human resources administration, either on a continuing basis or on special projects, said Patricia Anderson, executive director of the Illinois office of MRA in Palatine.
“These are people who, No. 1, are looking for flexibility,” said Anderson. “The vast majority of people are women, but we are seeing more men who want that, too.” Their part-time status doesn’t diminish their commitment, she added.
To ensure its part-timers aren’t treated like “second-class citizens”–and to attract and keep more who are looking for those opportunities–part-timers get pro-rated holidays, health insurance benefits and are eligible to participate in the non-profit organization’s 401(k) retirement plan.
MRA has also looked for ways to be flexible to employees in return for the flexibility it receives, she added. “We’ve had some support staff who say they want summers off. We’ve been able to accommodate that.”
