Professor Carl Van Horn and his colleagues at Rutgers University this spring did an in-depth survey of 944 workers, 504 of whom were involuntary part-time workers and 440 who were part-timers by choice. They were a sample of the 26 million Americans who hold part-time jobs.
The survey found that most of the part-timers were happy with their work lives. But there was a lot of unhappiness among the 6.5 million people who were working fewer than 35 hours a week because they couldn’t land a full-time job or because their employers cut their hours.