In the 1980s, a popular fast-food commercial touted chicken-breast sandwiches — and mocked chicken nuggets sold by competitors.
In the ad, a competitor's doofus clerk explains nuggets. "All the parts are crammed into one big part," he said. "And parts is parts."
Today, clerks may believe that catchphrase could apply to them as regular full-time schedules disappear. For many workers, hours are not only short, but increasingly erratic as managers scramble to cover shifts without the steadying influence of experienced full-time employees.
"It's ridiculous," says Amere Graham, an 18-year-old high school graduate who works at a McDonald's in Milwaukee. "My schedule is all over the place. It's completely unpredictable."
Government data support Graham's impressions of workplace conditions. The ranks of people working part time because they can't find full-time jobs have roughly doubled since the summer of 2007, from about 4.3 million to 8.2 million.
"There has been a surge in part-time work," says Aparna Mathur, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute.
The change reflects business owners' reluctance to hire full-time workers while they still have so many worries about the strength of the recovery and the cost of the Affordable Care Act, Mathur says. "You want to maintain flexibility so you can respond to the economy" without having to carry the costs of hiring and firing full-time employees, she says.
In a study of retail working conditions, conducted in the fall of 2011 in New York, only 17 percent of retail workers said they have a set schedule.
With so many people working in so many part-time positions, frustrations are growing, according to Michael Wilder, coordinator at Wisconsin Jobs Now, a union-supported group that advocates for low-wage workers.
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