THE THIRD WAVE
THE SLEEPLESS GORGON
But flextime, while widely publicized, is only a small part of the general restructuring of time that the Third Wave carries with it. We are also seeing a powerful shift toward increased night work. This is occurring not so much in the traditional manufacturing centers like Akron or Baltimore, which have always had a lot of workers on night shifts, but in the rapidly expanding services and in the advanced, computer- based industries.
“The modern city,” declares the French newspaper Le Monde, “is a Gorgon that never sleeps and in which … a growing proportion of the citizens work outside the [normal] diurnal rhythms.” Across the board in the technological nations the number of night workers now runs between 15 and -25 percent of all employees. In France, for example, the percentage has soared from only 12 in 1957 to 21 by 1974. In the United States the number of full-time night workers jumped 13 percent between 1974 and 1977; the total, including part-timers, reached 13.5 million.
Even more dramatic has been the spread of part-time work—and the active preference for it expressed by large numbers of people. In the Detroit area an estimated 65 percent of the total work force at the J. L. Hudson department stores consists of part-timers. Prudential Insurance employs some 1,600 part-timers in its U.S. and Canadian offices. In all, there is now one voluntary part-time worker for every five full-timers in the United States, and the part-time work force has been growing twice as fast as the full-time force since 1954.
So far has this process advanced that a 1977 study by researchers at Georgetown University suggested that in the future almost all jobs could be part-time. Entitled Permanent Part-Time Employment: The Manager’s Perspective, the study covered 68 corporations, more than half of which already used part-timers. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the percentage of unemployed workers who want only part-time work has doubled in the past twenty years.
The opening up of part-time jobs is particularly welcomed by women, by the elderly and semi-retired, and by many young people who are willing to settle for a smaller paycheck in return for time to pursue their own hobbies, sports, or religious, artistic, or political interests.
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