Moving from unemployed to working unemployed
By Ruth Sinai
Haaretz, November 1, 2004
Rahel Dadon is one of 92,000 workers who entered the labor force this year. She, seemingly, is a success story. But Dadon, like most of the new workers, is employed for only two hours a day, although she would like to work full-time.
A professional caregiver, Dadon stopped working two and a half years ago because of a car accident. At the beginning of 2004 she registered with the government Employment Service, and was referred to a home-care provider, but work is sparse and she sees only one elderly person a day, with her salary adding up to only NIS 600 a month.
"I'm fed up," says Dadon, a mother of three from Jerusalem. "I want a real salary, not pocket money. There are a lot of women in my situation in the neighborhood. I say, lift yourself up, because the government wants only to trample people, raise their own salaries and take from the poor."
Mali Orfali, another under-employed caregiver says: "No one wants to help us; all they care is that Netanyahu tells the press that we have climbed out of the recession."
Dr. Karnit Flug, director of the research division at the Bank of Israel, said that 62,000 of the news jobs created since the middle of 2003 are part-time. She describes Dadon's and other women's situation as "under-employment." Benny Pfefferman head of Industry and Trade Ministry's Planning, Research and Economy Administration, views this as a type of unemployment.
In fact, he says, the definition of unemployment does not reflect the true state of unemployment. Official figures place the average unemployment level in 2004 at 273,000. But if the 147,000 who work part-time but would like to work longer are added, the figure reaches 420,000 "who are either fully or partially exposed to unemployment," Pfefferman says. This reflects an unemployment rate of 16.5 percent, and not 10.3 percent, the official figure.
Some 500,000 employees in the work force work part-time for a variety of reasons. Some 20 percent, such as healthcare workers or teachers, work less than 35 hours a week, but are considered full-time workers.
Others work part-time because they take care of children, study at universities, are sick or prefer to do so for other reasons. But according to the Bureau of Statistics, the only group that has significantly grown in the past few years - from 20 percent of part-time workers in 2000 to 29 percent in the first quarter of 2004 - is those who would like to increase their work hours.
Professors Haya Stier and Yinon Cohen of the department of Labor Studies at Tel Aviv University have studied part-time employment and claim there is a clear correlation between the rise in unemployment and the increase in number of part-time workers.
Their data show that between 1979-1999 the number of involuntary part-time workers rose by 700 percent, while the number of employees in the work force merely doubled.
Most of the losers from this form of employment are women, and especially those who work in what Stier terms "pink collar occupations" - cashiers, retail, caregiving. In the past the number of women who worked part-time, but did not prefer to do so, was low, because many preferred part-time work.
But the economic situation and the increase in the number of educated women means fewer prefer part-time work. Pfefferman says that even if employment rises, the number of part-time workers will not significantly decrease, because hidden-unemployment is characteristic of the work-world we live in.
Today's employer don't want to risk providing full time employment and prefer maximum flexibility in hiring, where workers no long enjoy the protection of strong unions.
"Part-time work, which directly results in poverty will become a way of life for many workers. We won't go back to a state where everyone who wants to can work full-time," he said.
