Ever stop to wonder why there is a concept of "part time work"? It's the type of question I ask myself when I'm taking a shower. If I sang instead, it'd probably endanger my marriage.
Let's get right down to basics. Declaring 40 hours/week as being "full time" while declaring <30 hours/week as "part time" is completely and totally arbitrary.
Now my point here isn't about whether 40 hours/week is a proper "full time" number. That's certainly something that's been challenged and reviewed in other countries, and is fully deserving of separate consideration. My point here is really why <30 hours/week is this special thing called "part time" work with different rules from "full time" work.
This completely arbitrary distinction is bad for both employees and employers. Let us explore this down below the squiggle.
A functional policy would be a person who works 30 hours/week getting 75% of everything the equivalent worker gets at 40 hours/week. A person who works 20 hours/week gets 50%. This means 75%, 50%, etc, of everything the 40 hours/week worker gets including those percentages of benefits.
The savvy reader will immediately start pondering how certain benefits could be scaled by 75% or 50%. How does one provide 75% of the health insurance plan that a 40 hour/week worker gets. The solution is pretty simple. It’s phrased as “or the cash equivalent”.
So simply for easy math, we’ll say a company dishes out $1,000 of the company’s money to provide health insurance for a 40 hour/week worker. The company would then offer a choice to a 20 hour/week worker either to cover $500 of the corporate health insurance plan or give the worker $500 as the “cash equivalent”.
Let’s look at why this greatly improves the employment market for employees even from a conservative standpoint. A person who takes “personal responsibility” and works 40 hours/week, but in the form of two 20 hour/week jobs, gets all the same compensation as the person who works one job for 40 hours/week. The person is appropriately congratulated (thereby incentivized) for putting in a full 40 hours/week rather than being penalized (thereby dis-incentivized) just because their 40 hours is in the form of two 20 hour jobs.
Now let’s look at why this is good for employers. Employers no longer have an incentive to artificially create two 20 hour/week jobs when what they really need is one 40 hour/week worker. Those employers who honestly do only need 20 hour/week workers cannot be accused of artificially limiting work to “part time”. The employers would have no incentive to do so.
There would also no longer be an entirely artificial 30 hour/week cap causing employers to invent all kinds of schemes to make sure “part time” workers don’t exceed the cap. Instead employers can ask existing 20 hour/week employees to work 35 hours/week as business picks up without it causing any change to the employee’s status. Likewise if business lags, businesses can cut back hours without employees being subjected to an “all or nothing” artificial cut-off point for their benefits.
The bottom line is this approach creates a smooth sliding scale for employment hours and associated compensation and benefits that does not suffer from a completely arbitrary “part time” policy creating two classes of workers.
Either that or I’m getting too much shampoo in my ears when showering…