To Work We Go

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Kathleen Shelby, a partner in FlexTime Solutions, a Maplewood, N.J., staffing firm that supplies interim workers in marketing, public relations and communications to corporations, reports considerable success in placing women who have been out of the work force for as long as 10 years. Most, she says, are mothers who dropped out because they could not put in the 50-hour week many companies now demand of full-timers, but are happy to work for shorter periods.

Younger mothers, some analysts say, are returning to work sooner after giving birth--though few as quickly as Chicagoan Gina Johnson, 18. Only two weeks after her second baby was born last May, she returned to her job as shift manager in a fast-food restaurant, and she later landed higher-paying employment as manager of a card shop. Family members urged her to take more time off, says Johnson, who is single and engaged. But she told them, "I don't want anybody taking care of me." She gets baby-sitting help from the Daycare Action Council of Illinois but now can pay $30 a month of that herself.

THE YOUNG AND OLD Students have been holding down part-time jobs since education ceased to be a monopoly of the leisure classes, but employers are finding ways to get more of them to participate in the labor-short economy. For instance, United Parcel Service has an Earn and Learn program that offers part-timers an unusual benefit--student loans and tuition assistance. More than 8,000 students are currently enrolled in the program.

Several officials of A.A.R.P. and of employment agencies say they are finding work for more and more people over 55, though some of the prospects say this is true only for those with technological backgrounds. But the just enacted law that allows Social Security pensioners ages 65 to 69 to earn unlimited amounts without loss of benefits ought to prompt more seniors to work, or to work longer.

Carl Camden, executive vice president, field operations, sales and marketing for Kelly Services, reports that "a fair number" of the temps Kelly supplies to employers are in their 60s, and "these are some of the most productive workers we have." But, he observes, before the law was changed, many of them would "ask us to keep very specific checks on how much money they earned"--and would stop working as soon as they hit the point at which they would begin to lose Social Security benefits.

For employers, finding and hiring new workers is often neither easy nor cheap. The Home Shopping Network has attracted an effective if eclectic mix of seniors, middle-aged women of all races, and teenagers to answer the 160,000 calls that pour in daily to its center in St. Petersburg, Fla. But new management had to turn the company upside down to do it.

To begin with, HSN spent $6 million renovating facilities at the 59-acre campus, including the employee cafeteria. It set up a program with a local high school that is expected to give 30 to 50 students part-time jobs at the call center, and figures at least some will stay with HSN after they graduate. It is pushing flextime to the max. It already offered some 40 different full-time or part-time schedules, and now it is starting a pilot program that will allow employees to draw up their own schedules around a core of required hours. Lisa Letizio, senior vice president of human resources, thinks this will be especially attractive to mothers who want to put in fewer hours while their children are small, gradually working longer hours.