Unemployment for part-time workers

As I understand it, several governors are asking their legislatures to refuse that part of the stimulus money that extends benefits for part-time workers who lose their jobs. The governors of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi are among them.

These governors feel that such an addition to the unemployment insurance program, if begun, would be politically difficult to end. Once the stimulus money is gone, the state would then have to increase unemployment insurance premiums on businesses in the state, adding to their expenses.

All of that is true.

What they are not saying is that it has become a common practice for many businesses to hire many part-time workers instead of a smaller number of full-time workers deliberately, just so they will not have to pay benefits to those workers. Wal-Mart is not the only major chain that practices this.

One result of this practice has been to exacerbate the health care crisis by adding to the number of workers without health care.

Another has been to increase the number of working poor: people who have a job, but don't earn enough to sustain an adequate standard of living. These people further strain social service benefits, such as food stamps, housing assistance, etc.

In other words, to keep the cost of their business down, some businesses are deliberately acting to force the local and state governments to accept greater expenses. The taxpayer is being forced to assume the costs these businesses are refusing to pay. They are doing this very rationally; a good businessman acts to increase profits and/or decrease expenses. They do it because it is legal. It is an unintended consequence of the original decision to exclude part-time workers from unemployment insurance when that program was set up.

We need to decide if we are going to become a full-time or part-time labor economy. If we are going to make it economically advantageous for businesses to hire part-time workers instead of full-time ones, we need to structure our system so that the national, state, and local governments are prepared to take on the social costs of that decision.

In the long run, I think such a decision would be wrong economically, socially, and ethically. I believe it would increase the percentage of working poor at the expense of the middle class. I think it would greatly increase the tax burden on every level of government.