A number of our friends, acquaintances, and even at least one relative are victims of the new discrimination.  They include a university lecturer, a Walmart employee, a professional classical pianist, and a daughter who works with the disabled… and there are millions of Americans like them.  Who are they?  They’re the part-timers, the nearly thirty million plus Americans who work less than full-time, the majority of whom do not receive benefits, particularly health benefits. And the number of part-time employees in American business rises every year, so that part-timers are approaching twenty percent of the workforce.

More disturbing than this is the fact that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), almost all the increase in part-time employment since 1969 has been involuntary, in that employers have only offered those additional jobs as part-time, and in the majority of cases, employers are creating multiple part-time jobs rather than fewer full-time positions. There’s an economic rationale behind this, as shown by a 2012 BLS study that indicates full-time employees’ average hourly pay is some 60% higher than that of part-timers.

Over the past ten years the number of part-time jobs has doubled, while the number of full-time jobs has decreased by around nine million positions.  Even the current “positive” numbers in the decline of joblessness mask the fact that full-time jobs are continuing to decline, while part-time jobs are increasing at a rate faster than the decline of full-time positions.

Much of this change in the composition of employment is the result of computerization and statistical managing, because better data and software allow employers to use only the staff they think they need, and with the emphasis on profitability and the cutthroat nature of retailing in particular, the costs of fluctuating demand fall almost entirely on the part-time employees, rather than on management or permanent full-time employees.

In addition to financial costs, the increasing reliance on part-time employment creates stress and uncertainty among the part-timers. For example, a 2011 study of retail establishments in New York City showed that fifty percent of employees were part-time, and only about ten percent of the part-timers had fixed schedules on a week-to-week basis. The other problem with this increasing “management efficiency” in managing labor costs is that it makes it harder and harder for part-timers to cobble together two part-time positions in order to make ends meet because there’s less and less certainty in when they will work and for how long. This impacts everything from what they can afford to dealing with children and childcare.

While there’s a perception that temporary and part-time employment is largely confined to the retail and service industries, and to people without advanced training and education, that’s a complete misconception. Despite the growth of colleges and universities, and the increasing number of students graduating, the faculty composition over the last generation has shifted from being roughly 70% full-time to almost 70% part-time (or adjunct faculty), and with the passage of the Affordable Health Care Act, most state colleges and universities will have to either reduce the hours that existing part-time faculty teach and hire more, and likely less qualified adjuncts, if they can find them because the total compensation will decline, or add more full-time faculty, which the states cannot afford to fund.  This same problem will also affect hundreds of thousands of businesses as well.

Temporary employment in jobs requiring technology, business, computer, and other higher education skills has almost tripled in the last 30 years, and the temporary staffing and employment field was the largest growing employer segment in the United States over the last three years.   More and more businesses are laying off full-time skilled people, but hiring them, or others, back part-time as consultants.

The bottom-line?  American business – and higher education — will do anything to minimize labor costs, and that means – unless government gets more involved in labor policy and regulation – that more and more American families are going to see either a stagnation or a reduction in their real standard of living.  This has enormous implications for everyone, not just for those part-time employees.

What business and the politicians don’t seem to realize is that, as they move to a more “efficient” part-time workforce, there will be fewer and fewer full-time employees, and given the cost –pressures, and the threat of replacement by part-timers, even the full-time employees will be, and are, except for top management, compensated at a lower “real” level.  Both full-time employees and especially the growing ranks of part-time employees will have less and less money to spend on the goods and services that they provide.  Consumer demand over the past five years has been supported by a level of government borrowing that cannot continue indefinitely, or even for more than a few years. The only people immune to or insulated from this down-sizing of real income will be a comparatively small number of individuals with skills or positions of power.

Yet, the process of each business maximizing its labor “efficiency” results in a diminution of overall baseline purchasing power… and, unless the question is addressed on a society-wide basis, could result in an economic death spiral… if the social unrest created by the results of such headlong pursuit of “employee efficiency” doesn’t result in violent political upheaval first.  We’re already seeing signs of this in the growing support for Obama’s position on taxing the top two percent, because what most people don’t realize is that this is the first time ever in American history that a majority of the people have been in favor of tax increases on the well-off.

Will anyone in power really read the handwriting on the wall?

The other day, I came across a reader review of one of my books, which described it as formulaic.  And I’d agree… and I’d also call the reader who wrote the review either lazy or an idiot, if not both.  All books are formulaic, at least all books that more than a handful of people want to read.  Books require the formula of passable style and grammar, although better style and grammar are definitely a plus.  They require the formula of a plot of some sort.  They require the formula of some sort of resolution. In short, a book is an organized formula for providing entertainment or information, and possibly a great deal more.

So what do lazy idiots who use the term “formulaic” really mean?  According to A Handbook to Literature, “formulaic” is a term “applied to a work that relies excessively on set patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language.”  The problem with this definition is that all fiction relies on patterns of plot, character, sentiment, and language, and that there is no standard for defining “excessively,” except in the mind of the reader or reviewer.

As a writer, once I’ve set the parameters of a story, I try to make the systems and the characters true to themselves, if you will.  The magic systems or technology are consistent throughout.  The characters develop more as the story progresses, but those developments are a result of who they are and what happens to them. This, frankly, creates a problem for some readers, because people behave like people.  They seldom do strange things, and when they do, it’s for very good and logical reasons, at least to the character in question, and much of what shock there is in what I write comes from characters taking situations and abilities to their logical ends in order to accomplish what they feel is necessary. Formulaic?  I don’t think so, because I don’t find it “excessive,” and most of my readers don’t seem to… or if they do, they like that kind of order and organization.

Part of determining what is “excessive” is strictly a matter of personal taste.  While technically I think George R. R. Martin is a good writer, I find his use of violence and brutality excessive, and I could claim that his best-selling series is “formulaic” on those grounds.  The same could be said of Piers Anthony and his Xanth books, given the incredible overuse of puns.  And I, or any other well-informed reader, could make a similar case for any number of well-known and even critically acclaimed writers.

As in the case in many instances of comments about books, the use of the term “formulaic” may reveal far more about the reader or reviewer who uses the term than about the book being reviewed because, as I said at the beginning of  this commentary, in the broadest sense of the word, all books are formulaic.

Last week the Utah congressional delegation all affirmed that they would be true to their principles and oppose any tax increase for anyone, rich or poor. That got me to thinking, as such sweeping generalizations often do.  Over the years, there’s been a current of approval, in commentary and even in popular song, for people who have insisted on being true to their principles.  I have a problem with this.

In 1861, the leaders of the Confederacy decided to be true to their principles, those of states’ rights embodying the idea that states had the right to hold people of color in slavery and to buy and sell them as property. Following those principles, they led their states into secession.  Earlier, the Catholic Church held to the principle that torturing and killing people to “redeem their souls,” and then officials of the Anglican Church retaliated in various ways based on various principles. Then there was this fellow by the name of Adolf Hitler, whose principles included the idea that people who weren’t of Ayran genetic heritage were inferior, especially Semitic peoples, particularly the Jews, and that ethnic cleansing and mass extermination were principled.  He was certainly true to his principles to the end, even using railroads and troops to continue killing Jews when they could have been used to fight against the allies invading the lands he had earlier conquered.

I may just be an iconoclast, but I guess I just don’t see much virtue in being true to principles that are either suspect – or wrong.  Now… I know, “wrong” is a judgment on my part, but we do have to make judgments in life.  The problem, of course, is determining a moral basis for such judgments, and that gets into a detailed discussion that has consumed much time and effort, both on this blog and throughout human history.  Still, there are some areas of consensus, such as the fact that human slavery is wrong and that killing people solely because of their religious beliefs is as well… and there are certainly others. Likewise, there are the cases where valid moral values clash – which is what makes the abortion debate so thorny [if human life is sacred, and the mother will die without having an abortion, how does one choose without destroying one “sacred life”?].

In the pending “fiscal cliff” political situation, one side’s principles state that “rich” people should pay more – or at least they shouldn’t pay lower effective tax rates – than poor and middle class families because the society in which they live has allowed them to receive more.  The other side’s principles state that, in effect, that tax rates shouldn’t be increased on just those who make more.  Both sides are insisting on being true to their principles while the country faces a possible return of recession if the issue isn’t resolved and long-term financial crises if the overhanging issue of excessive deficit spending isn’t resolved.

Perhaps I’m just being a curmudgeon, but I don’t see much moral value in either side “being true to their principles,” particularly since both sets of principles being touted are flawed.

Why do people vote the way they do… and believe what they do?  A growing number of studies show a link between attitudes linked to heredity and political beliefs.  The issue has gotten hot enough that one U.S. congressman spearheaded an amendment to the National Science Foundation budget last May to cut a billion dollars. While the amendment failed, Congressman Jeff Flake’s second amendment to the NSF budget – one that banned any NSF funding of political science research – did pass, because Flake did not want the NSF funding research into the biological roots of political behavior.

According to a recent article in the British New Scientist, “there is a substantial body of data suggesting that conservatives and liberals really are different tribes, divided not by opinions so much as by temperament and even basic biology.”  Also interesting is the fact that the article and research were written by Americans and published in a British science magazine.  The article itself is comparatively even-handed, pointing out correctly that most research in the field is conducted by liberals and that there are difficulties with some studies.  But one of the underlying problems is that, by temperament and biology, the majority of scientists in most fields, excepting those involving engineering and directly related fields, tend to be “liberal” in outlook and politics.

All that said, more than 25 years of study indicate that political attitudes have a high degree of inheritability, and such studies include identical twins raised in totally different environments, who are far more likely to share political attitudes than do fraternal twins or genetically unrelated family members.  As a rule, but not invariably, conservatives are more likely to prefer people of their own ethnic background, straight people, and high-status groups.  Liberals are more comfortable than conservatives with those of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, as well as with members of ethnic or sexual minorities. Liberals tend to be more morally offended by inequality, while conservatives tend to be more morally offended by betrayals of the in-group, by disrespect for authority, and by signs of sexual or spiritual weakness or impurity.  These characteristics have been linked to anatomical differences in the size of various brain structures.  Conservatives have a higher need for certainty, while liberals tend to revel in mental challenges.

In this regard, I’ve always had the feeling that conservatives can’t find the truth because they’ve known it all along, whether it’s true or not, and liberals will never recognize it because they’re so involved in looking for the next thing that they’ll look right past it.

What is clear about all this research is that all of us are biologically inclined in a certain direction in what might be called our social outlook, some more so than others, whether that direction be conservative or liberal.  What is also true is that each of us does have the ability to examine those predilections… and to decide whether blindly following our feelings makes sense in any given situation or whether we need to examine what we feel more closely. Obviously, both outlooks are necessary in human society… or those with one inclination or the other would have been weeded out or marginalized, and given the near equal polarization in political outlooks in the United States, that hasn’t happened… and that means, again, blind insistence on doing either just the “conservative” thing or the “liberal” thing is counterproductive.  Working out a compromise is necessary.

Unfortunately, I don’t see many signs of this happening in our political situation here in the United States at the moment… and it’s something that needs to occur.  As a society, we can’t afford to follow blindly just one of the genetic predilections that evolved to make us successful hunter-gatherers. Nor can we turn our back on what science is revealing about who and what we are. Those are recipes for disaster in a high-tech complex world.

The “business model” has triumphed again.  Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, a holiday first officially celebrated in the entire United States on the last Thursday of November as a result of a Presidential proclamation of Abraham Lincoln in 1863, and then moved to the fourth Thursday of the month by Franklin Roosevelt, in order to give the country an economic lift. Little did Roosevelt know what he started.

This year, from Wal-Mart on – or up – retailers across the United States invaded Thanksgiving with “Black Friday” specials on Thanksgiving Day itself.  Oh, there were Wal-Mart employees protesting at hundreds of stores, but the shoppers largely ignored them and surged into stores, greedily grabbing whatever specials they could find.  From my antediluvian viewpoint, the invasion of Thanksgiving by rampant commercialism signifies, in both a metaphorical and practical sense, that the majority of Americans have become totally unaware of how fortunate we are as a society.  Can we not set aside a single day out of the entire year in which to consider and reflect on those aspects of life for which we are grateful?

Last year, at this time, I cited a short story by Frederick Pohl called “Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus,” published in 1956 and set in a future where the “Christmas season” begins in September, and I wondered how long it would be before Halloween and Christmas squeezed out Thanksgiving.  Based on the blizzard of ads in my newspapers – more than fifty separate ad sections – on Thanksgiving day itself and the media hype of Black Friday beginning on Thanksgiving, it appears as though the original purpose of Thanksgiving has already been all but lost to the “ecstasy of unbridled avarice,” to steal a quote from another Christmas staple.

Then again, perhaps people who cannot maintain a Thanksgiving tradition deserve exactly what they are getting from the businesses who push Black Friday – lots of cheap goods produced all too often in third world sweatshops by people who have little to thank anyone for, fewer and fewer good American jobs…and more than a few business leaders who insist that paying lower tax rates than their underpaid employees is necessary for jobs creation.