More bad news for workers, especially the unemployed.

Weighing Costs, Companies Favor Temporary Help

Temporary workers are starting to look, well, not so temporary.

Despite a surge this year in short-term hiring, many American businesses are still skittish about making those jobs permanent, raising concerns among workers and some labor experts that temporary employees will become a larger, more entrenched part of the work force.

This is bad news for the nation’s workers, who are already facing one of the bleakest labor markets in recent history. Temporary employees generally receive fewer benefits or none at all, and have virtually no job security. It is harder for them to save. And it is much more difficult for them to develop a career arc while hopping from boss to boss.

“We’re in a period where uncertainty seems to be going on forever,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So this period of temporary employment seems to be going on forever.”

College Grads: In Debt and Flipping Burgers

What could be more jarring to our nation’s sensibilities than questioning the value of a college degree? Generations of parents have scrimped and sacrificed to fund their children’s tuitions, priming their progeny’s social and economic ascent. The nation has rewarded our troops with access to higher education; we have provided taxpayer-supported loans to college students; our finest schools have raised billions to provide scholarships for the gifted. A college degree sits aside motherhood and baseball in America’s iconography.

Which is why a new piece published by The Chronicle of Higher Education – “The Great College Degree Scam” — is alarming. According to a report by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), “approximately 6o percent of the increase in the number of college graduates over the last 16 years, from 1992 to 2008, worked in jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers relatively low skilled – occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less.” Researchers looked at these figures: In 1992, total college graduate employment was 28.9 million, with 5.1 million (17.5 percent) working in low-skill jobs. In 2008, the number of college grads employed increased to 49.35 million, of which 17.4 million (35 percent) were in fields not normally requiring a college degree.”

They cite two examples. In 1992, there were 119,000 waiters and waitresses that held college degrees; by 2008, that number had soared to 318,000. The total number of such workers had expanded by more than 1 million over the same time frame; 20 percent of those new openings were filled by college grads. The same pattern emerges for cashiers; 20 percent of new cashier jobs have been taken by four-year graduates.

More debate here.