Share of U.S. workers holding multiple jobs is rising
Companies offer part-time jobs instead of full-time ones because then they don't need to offer benefits that are required for a full-time job. In other words, the current rules of the game are directly incentivizing this behavior.<p>The incentive can be very easily removed by legislating that a part-time job would need to offer a fraction of the benefits proportional to the amount of hours the employee works per week.<p>Ideally, there should be some sort of a credit transfer mechanism, where an employee working multiple part-time jobs that combine to 40+ hours a week could get benefits equivalent to a full-time job at one of the workplaces, proportionally covered by all employers.<p>Another option would be to crack down on monopolies and large chains. If you employ 10000 corporate drones, who are expected to follow the same corporate instructions day-to-day and can be swapped out by a fresh hire without any loss of productivity, they by definition don't have any economic leverage. On the other hand, if the same market niche is occupied by 1000 independent 10-employee companies, the overall efficiency is lower, but the leverage of each employee (and the salary they can negotiate through supply/demand) is higher. Because in a smaller company you are someone the owner trusts to delegate part of their business, and not just a line on the spreadsheet.