The numbers come first. Out of a U.S. workforce of 162 million, just under 57 million people — more than one in three workers — hold what labor economist Paul Osterman calls 'disposable jobs.' That figure comes from a nationally representative survey of over 6,000 people conducted in late 2022, supplemented by nearly 100 interviews with workers, employers and policymakers. Osterman lays out the full case in his new book, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment.
Osterman identifies three distinct categories. Contractors employed by staffing firms but working at a client's site — think temporary office workers, building cleaners, security guards and travel nurses — account for 13% of the workforce. Organizational freelancers, including rideshare drivers, food-delivery couriers and computer programmers, represent 5%. The largest single slice is marginal workers: people formally employed by a company but locked out of any promotion ladder or job security, accounting for 17% of the workforce.
The marginal category is where the structural story gets sharp. Staff attorneys at law firms are hired as employees but are explicitly excluded from the partner track. Adjunct professors teach courses without any path to tenure. In 1970, tenure or tenure-track faculty made up 73% of those teaching at U.S. colleges and universities. By 2021 that share had collapsed to 32%.
The economics are straightforward. Part-time jobs pay an hourly wage nearly 20% below what full-time workers earn after controlling for age, education, occupation and industry. Factor in benefits and the gap widens by another 5 percentage points. High turnover, far from being a problem for employers in low-wage sectors, is a feature: one manager interviewed by a research team led by professor Susan Lambert put it bluntly — 'Wait a day for turnover' — explaining why his firm had no need for temp agencies at all.
Regulation has sharpened the incentive further. The Affordable Care Act requires employers with 50 or more workers to provide health insurance — but only for employees working 30 or more hours a week. As of 2026 the penalty for leaving a qualifying worker uninsured stands at $3,340 per employee. Researchers who compared part-time trends in retail, hotels and restaurants before and after the ACA fully took effect in 2014 found the law accelerated the shift toward sub-30-hour schedules in exactly those industries.
The PepsiCo detail Osterman opens with is not a quirk. The contractors hired to taste Doritos for addictiveness are a symbol of how far the disposable model has traveled up the value chain — from janitorial services to professional and even creative roles.
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The free-market reader should sit with two competing truths here. Flexible labor arrangements can reflect genuine gains for both sides: freelancers who value autonomy, firms that need elastic capacity. That trade is real and worth defending.
But the ACA data point is a warning about what happens when Washington engineers the cost structure of employment. A penalty threshold set at 30 hours does not make workers more secure — it makes 29-hour schedules a rational business decision. When the administrative state prices full-time commitment out of reach for small and mid-size employers, the result is not a flexible workforce. It is 57 million people without a career ladder. Capital rewards clear rules; what it got instead was a compliance calculation. The cost lands on the worker.
