Alain Touraine (the famous French sociologist) says that full-time employment is disappearing in favor of mushrooming part-time / temp gigs because there is a huge demand for precisely this type of change among people coming on the job market now.
I do understand that such enormous social shifts do not happen unless there’s demand for them. But I belong to a different generation and come from a different world. This is so counterintuitive to me that I get it but I still don’t get it.
Clarissa's Blog 
There is a demand for such just in time labor by employers and has been for a while. The scheduling of work hours for many workers in the retail and food service industries has long reflected this desire to only have workers on the clock during profitable hours. I can’t imagine employees, however, preferring this to stable and regular full time hours.
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Exactly, it’s very hard to process. But this is the new trend that is unlikely to change any time soon.
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This tends to remind me of Richard Sennett’s “corrosion of character”, by which would-be employees are co-opted by their employers to the point that they start repeating the mantras the management tends to offer …
Sennett’s analysis of how the “flexible worker” comes into being definitely applies in this case — the people subject to these regimes are made to feel that they should be nearly perfectly fungible in economic terms.
We may as well be talking about “carbon-based productivity units”, and I have heard some incredibly cynical management refer to their first-tier workers as such …
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Workplace does mold people, but let’s not forget that people mold the workplace as well. It never goes in just one direction.
Example: there is a concerted effort to take control over campuses out of the hands of academics. But nobody has to force academics to relinquish control. They are joyfully doing it themselves.
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Full time employment is alive and well in China.
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I’m hearing that the standard of living is improving in China. This means they will catch up eventually. Not right now but eventually.
This is a trend in the societies of overeaters (my term). In subsistence level societies, this is not possible.
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I’d rather be employed full-time. Does that make me old?
Right now, with my current job, I’d rather be part-time, but that has more to do with the current temperatures than anything else.
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Does he have a proposed explanation for why young new workers prefer part time jobs? Is it for flexibility plus the younger folks generally being comfortable enough that you don’t feel like you need to work all the time?
I don’t really get it, but I guess I am on the cusp – I prefer full time work, but I can see the appeal of switching jobs regularly so you can try new things, take extended trips, etc.
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I wonder if part of this phenomenon is young people making lemonade out of lemons. They see few chances for full-time stable careers, so they might as well find and enjoy whatever benefits (flexibility and variety) that the current situation can provide.
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There are people who are offered really amazing full-time employment and who reject it because “I’d just rather pick up a few internships here and there while I figure out what I want to do.” These are not very young people either. They are often past 30.
The whole thing drives me nuts but I’ve got to accept that they have the right to live as they wish.
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Apparently, they believe that there’s more to life than work and that dedicating an enormous portion of one’s life to work just so that one can buy more things in order to work even more to buy even more things doesn’t appeal any longer.
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Just to clarify: I personally am heavily into the “work more , buy more stuff” model.
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People want decent paying jobs. Corporations now treat employees as replaceable and want to minimize labor costs. Part time jobs with no benefits are nothing anyone wants, at least from a worker perspective. Touraine is either senile or has become an apologist for the corporate world.
By the way, the province adjacent to Hong Kong has achieved a standard of living comparable to the US.
One plausible scenario is the demise of large retailers in favor of small local stores. I can source car parts of Amazon, but if I want an expert to do the installation, I don’t need Sears or Pep Boys. The same might be true of clothing, food and other product categories. Even banking.
Ultimately, doing away with corporate dinosaurs will increase the number of local jobs and improve working conditions.
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I’m all in favor of choosing small (ish) companies as a place of employment and avoiding the huge corporate dinosaurs. My sister (the recruiter ) actually avoids working with the dinosaurs because she doesn’t have an interest in candidates who are robotic enough to want to be in that environment.
My husband worked for a large corporation for a few months, and it was horrible. Complete dehumanized and ridiculously dependent on hierarchies. And now he’s at a smaller company and is very happy with the environment.
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I also agree as a consumer that small and local is better. We first went for our mortgage to BofA but then choose a small local bank where we know the owner’s first name and feel treated like human beings and not cogs.
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full-time employment is disappearing in favor of mushrooming part-time / temp gigs because there is a huge demand for precisely this type of change among people coming on the job market now.
If that were actually true, you’d see a rise in salary and benefits for part time temp gigs. This is not the case regardless of the job level. The much vaunted flexibility is for the employer, not the employee.
I haven’t heard a single living breathing person in my milieu say “I want to stitch together a bunch of part time temp jobs for the rest of my life.” The people that hard sell you on the benefits of part time jobs are part of the following groups: 1)management, 2)writers for business publications or have a book to sell, 3)Boomers trying to tell everyone else they didn’t get a raw deal, 4)Xers and Millennials saying ” this is the new reality we don’t know any other, look on the bright side. ” It’s reactive, it’s not being driven by these young workers.
Now there are people who want temp or part time jobs but it’s always temporary and not part of an ongoing lifestyle.
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I’m sorry, I’m not seeing the logic. The salary and the benefits don’t need to go up for temp gigs precisely because there is demand for them.
Of course, it will take forever for new narratives to catch up with new realities. So for now people are saying, “Of course, I will eventually settle down with a job and a mortgage but first, I want to go to Europe for a year and after that maybe to Turkey, and I always thought it would be cool to live in Japan for a few years.” I heard this from a very smart graduate last weekend. Her mother heard this conversation and chimed in with, “I so wish I could do this too because I’m now 60 and I feel like I have wasted my life, staying for 30 years in the same place and in the same job.”
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I’m thinking there are two separate but interacting trends…
One: businesses want employees that don’t mean a lot of benefits and perks, if that means less efficiency here and there they mostly assume the long term savings are worth it.
Two: I’m too lazy to look it up but starting sometime in the early 90s I was hearing about extended adolescence (though extended young adulthood might be a better term). Roughly the idea goes that a combination of extended life spans and general prosperity in the west mean that the natural life ages are being extended and re-formed.
What used to be considered childhood (that ended at around 6 now extends well into the teen years (another reason that helicopter parents treat 16 year olds like 5 year olds used to be treated). Adolescence into the late twenties (at least) and young adulthood well into people’s thirties or even early 40s.
I remember when you were supposed to start working either by 18 (if you didn’t go to college) or 23 (if you did). Within a period of five or so years after starting work you were expected to get married, start having kids and assume a mortgage. That model is dead in most of the country.
Even in Poland this life …. tempo change has started. I remember in the early 90s how young people getting married and settling down and starting working were in comparison with the US. The saying was that female students expected to be married by the fifth and final year of studies (with lots of jokes about desperate students with no fiance on the horizon).
No, almost no students are married and most don’t expect to marry for a few more years (marriage and kids are still very strong cultural ideals but both are being put off until later).
Now that i think of it I can’t remember the last pregnant student in a class of mine (actually I can it was about 5 years ago when it used to be a regular occurence).
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“I remember when you were supposed to start working either by 18 (if you didn’t go to college) or 23 (if you did). Within a period of five or so years after starting work you were expected to get married, start having kids and assume a mortgage. That model is dead in most of the country.”
It’s so much a social class thing. The middle-class kids are exactly as you describe. And then helicoptering is also conditioned by all that. Having 3 kids by the age of 30 is not likely to leave one desperate to helicopter while having 1 kid at 35 will give one tons of leisure and energy to do just that.
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I would prefer to work part-time (or even opt out of the work world) if financially possible…
I did work part-time for 5 years. I was paid as an independent contractor and the “employer” did this so as not to pay health benefits or any other insurances. As a bachelor, I was able to afford a tiny apartment, drive an old vehicle and eat. It’s funny though, they offered me a “full time” position and called it a career. I didn’t want it. It was insulting actually, they payed me not very well, then after 5 years offered me a “career.” What was I doing for 5 years? Well, I was cold calling for a technology company. In the new role they offered, it would be calling a different industry. Since I would be starting from scratch, building a new book of business, it was essentially taking a pay cut to sit in a cubicle for more hours each day. But now I’d have “health insurance” and have taxes taken from my check instead of having to pay my own taxes.
The truth is most employers abuse their employees and many work environments are unpleasant. If I was doing interesting, creative work, then more time would be gratifying, but most jobs are thankless labor. I don’t think it’s “entitlement” that people are waking up to this and want other things from life…
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Thank you for sharing your story! It definitely adds to the discussion.
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