News item: In October, Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the U.S. with revenues of $310 billion a year, announced it was going to double the number of its workers employed part-time - from 20 percent to 40 percent of its total work force - while reducing full-time jobs by yet unknown thousands at the company.

Given Wal-Mart's total U.S. employment of 1.3 million, that means 260,000 more Wal-Mart workers will now make roughly half of what full-time employees earn. What little health benefits and other company-paid benefits the 260,000 had as full-time employees will be reduced or eliminated. Wal-Mart will save an estimated $3.042 billion a year in wages and benefits by doubling its part-time work force to 40 percent, for a total of 520,000 part-timers.

Wal-Mart also announced in October a "cap" on wages that will impact many thousands more of its workers. In addition, both part-time and full-time workers will have to work erratic work schedules and be on call nights and weekends, with as little as 24-hour notice of work shift changes.

The combined total from the announced changes could easily amount to $5 billion a year in direct savings to the company and, in turn, in lost income to workers.

Wal-Mart is organized labor's favorite corporate whipping boy - a retailing behemoth that has shown the rest of corporate America how to cut employee-related costs while maximizing profits. But Wal-Mart is only the most visible symbol of a massive corporate restructuring that has shaken American industry - and its workforce - to their core.

Jack Rasmus, author of The War At Home: The Corporate Offensive From Ronald Reagan To George W. Bush, took a look at the affect of that ongoing restructuring and offered a synopsis of his book to the International Labor Communications Association.

"Both the dismantling of entire industries and the continuing mass exportation of jobs, as well as today's continuing creation of a two-tier work force with tens of millions of second-class workers, must be checked before there can be an end to the current massive shift of incomes between classes in America," Rasmus concluded.

Rasmus correlated today's economy with that of the Great Depression, where "the picture was one of millions of U.S. workers on the move, criss-crossing the country looking for any kind of work. The overall picture today is one of millions of U.S. jobs moving in, out, and across U.S. external borders or being radically re-cast in new forms by corporations intent on reducing costs and expanding profit margins."

He wrote that "vast armies of workers" are moving across and between virtual internal borders of under-employment, temporary and semi-employment and underground employment, as they "desperately attempt to survive corporate restructuring of jobs and the now three-decade-long freeze that has occurred in the real value of their wages and earnings."

Corporate restructuring began in the 1980s, with the off-shoring of U.S. manufacturing operations. That trend spread to the technology industry in the mid-1990s and in recent years has migrated to other major sectors of the economy. Rasmus pointed out that one of the latest trends is off-shoring medical procedures: government subsidized clinics in Singapore are urging American health insurance companies to send them patients, since heart bypasses can be performed there at one-third the cost - and that's including travel expenses.

"The dismantling of the U.S. manufacturing base, in particular," Rasmus wrote, "is about to enter a new phase with the imminent exportation of at least 200,000 more U.S. auto industry jobs to China, India, and Mexico over the next three years."

As Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, a former U.S. Federal Reserve Board vice-chair, admitted in Foreign Affairs: "We have so far barely seen the tip of the off-shoring iceberg, the eventual dimensions of which may be staggering."

Corporate restructuring of jobs and job markets in the U.S. has also taken other forms. Industry-wide collective bargaining agreements are a thing of the past, with only 8 percent of the nation's private sector workforce unionized. A reverse kind of off-shoring brings in workers under H-1B visas, where jobs requiring high skills are allocated under visas to foreign professionals.

They can at least be counted: Rasmus reports that nearly five million workers have disappeared from official government totals of those potentially available for work - apparently neither employed or unemployed, "but labeled missing by economists who can't seem to account for where they've gone."

Like Wal-Mart, big-name retailers like Sears, Target, and others are rapidly shifting to part-time jobs as well. The major department store chain Mervyns announced it was terminating all full-time employees and replacing them with part-time and temporary employees. Soon big box retail will be virtually all part-time/temp employment. A similar trend has been growing in the hotel, hospitality, and related industries.

Trucking companies are dramatically reducing their traditional work force of permanent drivers and leasing out their vehicles to independent contractors. Workers in manufacturing, too, are feeling the heat: 3,000 workers in the HP manufacturing facility in Boise, Idaho in 2005 discovered that HP management overnight arbitrarily reclassified everyone as "independent contractors" instead of employees.

And as the dismantling of the U.S. auto industry accelerates, tens of thousands of temporary workers in many plants in that industry will receive wages about half of what unionized auto workers once made and few if any benefits.

Even though the methodology for counting temporary workers isn't consistent, the trend toward making workers part-time is clear. Combined part-time and temp jobs have increased from a combined 29.3 million in 2000 to 33.8 million by 2004 - a gain of 15.3 percent in just four years.

Rasmus stated: "Those who wonder why there are 47 million workers in the U.S. today without any form of health insurance should consider the effects of corporate job restructuring… 60 million workers in the U.S. don't have a regular, permanent, full-time job any more in America.

"With 30 million new part-time, temp, and contract workers getting on average a third less pay and 75 percent to 80 percent less in benefits, the aggregate annual wage savings for corporate America due to this restructuring amounts to roughly $350 billion a year in pay and benefits alone.

"Any effective strategy aimed at restoring the growth of union labor and the effectiveness of union bargaining in America, and in turn halting the current $1 trillion shift in relative income in the U.S., will have to address this corporate restructuring of jobs in America."