This has been a year of big changes for me, most of them for the good. After three years of under and unem­ploy­ment, I rejoined the work­force this Sep­tem­ber in a full-time job that, I’m happy to say, seems to be going quite well. While I miss the daily rural beauty of west­ern Mass, I’m also deriv­ing real (if sur­pris­ing) plea­sure from being back in a city. Plus friends and a weekly UMass Amherst teach­ing gig still draw me back on a reg­u­lar basis.

My sit­u­a­tion at this time last year was very dif­fer­ent – as reflected in the title of last year’s hol­i­day post: Thanks­giv­ing in Plan B Nation (or how to be grate­ful when you don’t feel grate­ful). I had just started this blog – that post was its fifth – and was still hav­ing a hard time mak­ing sense of my life’s tra­jec­tory. I’m doing what? I’m liv­ing where? All that work, all those cre­den­tials, and I’ve ended up here?

This year, I have no trou­ble tap­ping into grat­i­tude: Work, friends, writ­ing, home – all of it, right at the moment, feels pretty good, a tes­ta­ment to how sud­denly life can turn around.

But along with these obvi­ous rea­sons, I’m grate­ful for some­thing more: I’m grate­ful both for what I have now and for what I didn’t have then.

I’m grate­ful for how this time in the jobs wilder­ness forced me to expand my sense of who I am apart from my credentials.

I’m grate­ful for the ways it led me to become braver as a writer – to take risks that I likely wouldn’t oth­er­wise have taken.

I’m grate­ful for this blog and other writ­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties – for the intel­lec­tual sus­te­nance, sup­port, and friend­ships, con­nec­tions that I am tak­ing with me into this next stage of life.

I’m grate­ful for hav­ing had a chance to move to the coun­try and deepen my ties to a part of the world I love.

I’m grate­ful for the ways this stretch of life fos­tered greater com­pas­sion for mil­lions of peo­ple strug­gling for rea­sons that are often largely (or entirely) beyond their control.

And most of all, I’m grate­ful for the fact that I can feel grate­ful – for the fact that I had the resources to nav­i­gate these chal­lenges with­out being crushed by them. In that, I was very, very lucky. Many, of course, are not.  As I look to the future in Plan B Nation, grat­i­tude strikes me as an excel­lent foun­da­tion for think­ing about how to change this.

© 2012, amy gut­man. All rights reserved.

“Some folks do all the mar­ryin’ for the rest of us,” a sin­gle South­ern friend once quipped, con­tem­plat­ing a twice-wed acquain­tance prepar­ing to tie the knot once again.

More and more, the same thing appears to be true of work. This thought first struck me a cou­ple years back dur­ing my seem­ingly end­less stretch of under and un-employment. A friend (who shall remain name­less since I know with­out ask­ing that he – or she – would want it that way) was jug­gling four jobs at once: uni­ver­sity teach­ing, a book con­tract, a weekly col­umn for a national pub­li­ca­tion, and a pub­lic ser­vice post. By way of con­trast, I at the time had none.

It didn’t make a lot of sense to me then, and it doesn’t now – even as I find myself sud­denly switch­ing roles. From no jobs, I’ve gone to hav­ing two: a full-time posi­tion in com­mu­ni­ca­tions and a part-time teach­ing gig. My chal­lenges are now the reverse of what they were before. I’ve gone from hav­ing no work at all to work­ing all the time.

And appar­ently, I’m far from alone – in both expe­ri­ences. Last week, I lis­tened with grim fas­ci­na­tion to a report on NPR’s On Point about America’s grow­ing hordes of invol­un­tary part-time work­ers. In recent years, the ratio of full to part-timers has been doing a flip-flop. Over just two decades many major retail­ers have gone from 70% or more full-timers to that per­cent­age of part-timers, as the New York Times recently reported.

This wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily be a bad thing. But, as it hap­pens, it is. Here’s why: Part-timers can’t sup­port them­selves on the $8.00 or $10 an hour they make – espe­cially given that employ­ers often limit their hours to 10 or 15 a week. 15 times $10? You do the math.

So why don’t they just get another job? Because they can’t. Retail­ers are increas­ingly requir­ing what’s known in the indus­try as “open avail­abil­ity.” You may work only 10 hours a week, but you’re still expected to be ready and wait­ing 24/7.

Behind this dis­turb­ing trend is increas­ingly sophis­ti­cated soft­ware that now enables com­pa­nies to track cus­tomer flow by 15-minute incre­ments, call­ing in part-timers for the brief win­dows, some­times just a cou­ple of hours, when their labor will con­tribute most to the company’s bot­tom line. What if you need to plan for child­care or you want to take a col­lege class? The response is a sim­ple one, just two words: Too bad.

Most appalling of all (at least to me) is the prac­tice known as “on-call sched­ul­ing,” where employ­ees are required to call in two hours before a shift would begin to find out if they’ll be work­ing. Are they paid for block­ing out this time? No, they are not.

As a grow­ing num­ber of crit­ics like this one are not­ing, this essen­tially amounts to cor­po­rate wel­fare. In shift­ing the costs to employ­ees, busi­nesses are push­ing many of them into poverty. The rest of us pay for food stamps and emer­gency room vis­its to com­pen­sate for busi­ness refusal to pay a liv­ing wage – or even to allow their employ­ees a chance to pick up hours else­where. (And this issue isn’t just lim­ited to part-timers either – ongo­ing con­tract nego­ti­a­tions in Cincin­nati are bring­ing atten­tion to the fact that many of the city’s full-time jan­i­tors qual­ify for pro­grams such as food stamps, Med­ic­aid, and hous­ing assis­tance, as the Nation described last week.) Romney’s 47% have noth­ing on Wal-Mart and Aber­crom­bie & Fitch.

Mean­while, at the other end of the spec­trum, high-end salaried work­ers – where added hours mean added prof­its for employ­ers with­out added costs – are see­ing their hours shoot through the roof. Within days of hear­ing the NPR report on invol­un­tary part-timers, I also read an essay by a mom who’d just given up her cor­po­rate law job, find­ing it impos­si­ble to bal­ance the demands of work with the other demands of life.

My own sit­u­a­tion is, of course, quite dif­fer­ent. For one thing, I don’t have kids (though I do have other inter­ests that also take time). For another, the hours of my full-time job have been entirely rea­son­able. It’s adding another job on top of it that’s made things hard to man­age. But like many work­ers laid-off dur­ing the Great Reces­sion, I returned to the work­force in a posi­tion that pays sub­stan­tially less than my for­mer. Yes, I love teach­ing, but I can also use the money.

This morn­ing I snapped wide awake at 4:30 am. This was a fre­quent occur­rence dur­ing the turbo-charged stress of my job search, but this is the first time it’s hap­pened since being re-employed. At first, I was mys­ti­fied about what lay behind it. But two hours later, it’s come to me: There was some­thing I needed to say.

© 2012, amy gut­man. All rights reserved.