full-time work

According to a metric tracked by Gallup since 2011, less than 44 percent of American adults have a full-time job. Although it will always be a goal to increase this percentage, to encourage employers to understand why the stability of full-time work benefits both worker and company, it's also beholden on all of us teaching career-prep college courses to make students aware of this and teach strategies for navigating the world of contingent or permanent part-time employment.

Meanwhile, CNN just "broke the news" that the "U.S. economy added 204,000 jobs in October, more than analysts expected. Unemployment rate rose to 7.3% from 7.2%." Such substantial job gains coupled with a rise in the unemployment rate indicates that there are many more millions of people who'd gladly work were there opportunity to do so.

And here's another piece that includes charts to confirm, once again, that it is a bad time for younger workers in America.

united states of contingency

Beyond academia, contingent employment is in the news, too, and increasingly common among millennials. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Younger workers were four times more likely to have contingent jobs than older workers." (I have no statistics on how the writers of all the hyperlinked article were paid; in commercial publishing there are many examples of writers being paid in "exposure," and not by cold hard direct deposit or any other means.)