Neoliberal think tanks tout part-time employment as a great boon to humanity:
A thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which has organised the event with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, argues that if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be curbed. Anna Coote, of NEF, said: “There’s a great disequilibrium between people who have got too much paid work, and those who have got too little or none.”
Got it? The reason why so much people can’t get a full-time job and have to get by on a patchwork of temp jobs with zero benefits is because a benevolent neoliberal authority decided they will be better off this way. Of course, nobody at the think tank in question is likely to accept part-time employment any time soon. These valiant folks are sacrificing themselves, working full-time, getting great salaries, and consuming like crazy so that we don’t have to do it. Oh, the rich person’s burden, how heavy art thou!
Remember, people, whenever you hear anybody use the expression “job sharing”, run away as fast as you can. It’s part of the infamous “sharing economy” which translates as “a scam aimed at robbing you of medical care, pension, paid vacation, and any kind of worker rights whatsoever.”
Clarissa's Blog 
Nothing new! 30 + years ago there were plenty plugging the idea that the future would be full of leisure for us all because computers would run everything. Quite what anybody would live on wasn’t considered, neither was any thought given to who would dig the drains, nor who would care for the very infirm. Nobody wants their bum to be wiped by a computer!
LikeLike
But Clarissa, some philosopher says part time jobs are a great boon to society driven by demands by new workers!
I just think people keep watching The Jetsons every few years to posit some new theory about work.
” Hello, honey. Bad day at the office?”
“Yeah, those three hour workdays at the office are killing me!”
LikeLike
There’s absolutely a demand for this. If there weren’t a demand it wouldn’t exist. This is a system that is fed on both ends, and that’s precisely why it’s so scary. It’s convenient to the capital to have precarious, part-time, no-benefit workers. But the workers are loving this shit. And when they clock in to what they are doing, it will be too late to do anything about it.
A day doesn’t pass that I don’t read a post by some facile idiot who gushes about the joys of part-time temping as a lifestyle.
LikeLike
Here, for instance, is an example of a toothy idiot gushing about “the culture of professional part-time work”: http://www.vox.com/2015/7/21/8974435/switzerland-work-life-balance
LikeLike
My big question upon reading this is “Who is really subsidizing this?”
If you believe her, she had a ridiculous amount of maternity leave and benefits and income and a child stipend and paid less in taxes — so much so she barely notices being double taxed and paying taxes in America. I honestly don’t think the dividend tax rate accounts for it. And if it’s so damned wonderful, why isn’t she ensconced permanently in Switzerland? Why is she a freelancer in America where she pays double the standard employment tax rate (since she doesn’t have an employer that pays half)? I get that she wrote a book about it, but it feels like elite posturing to me.
LikeLike
She follows her husband around, extolling this way of life. What’s much more interesting is the people who are linking to the article and referring to it in superlative terms. In my FB feed, for instance, the article has been shared with great admiration by two adjuncts. The article makes their own thwarted professional lives seem worldly and “European.”
I’m very preoccupied by this exaltation of precarious existences. Of course, we might have hit my own point of unbending rigidity. Maybe the problem is all mine.
LikeLike
The employers’ half is deducted from the gross income when they file their taxes. This is true for all taxpayers with self-employment income.
LikeLike
Once again, something we’re all supposed to believe in “the sharing economy” is a way for a bunch of clever hucksters to gain more power and prestige…
LikeLike
I don’t, however, think the demise of paid work is entirely artificial or a product of policy and/or greed. I think it’s the relentless expansion of robotics and advanced computers. There’s still plenty of work needs doing, fixing our infrastructure, caring for and educating children, caring for the disabled and the aging, research, creating beauty and art. The challenge is how to harness a significant part of the sidelined workforce to do this worthy work. Economist Jeremy Rifkin wrote the book in 1995. Jon Taplin updated the information recently at the Annenberg Institute in California. Another recent (and somewhat scary) book is “The Coming Jobs War.”
LikeLike
All true. I believe this is one of the greatest political challenges we are facing today that should be at the center of any discussion of politics.
LikeLike