As the American economy continues to falter, workers are shouldering the brunt of the burden. Wages have been cut, hours have been taken in, and benefits are being delayed or held up. It used to be that working in the U.S. brought with it certain distinctions and protections that you could find nowhere else. Now, many Americans are being forced to settle for positions they would have rejected just years or months ago.

According to CNNMoney.com, the few jobs that are returning to the work pool are very different from the ones that left when the financial crash sent our already broken economy into a tailspin.

Unemployment remains near 10 percent in the United States and will likely remain there for months or even years. In the mean time the American worker is expected to make due with temporary work, no benefits, and part-time jobs to make up for everything they have lost.

Some sectors of the economy, led by a select group of elites, are raking in huge profits. The multinational corporations, the oil companies, the banks, and their counterparts are making money left and right. Unfortunately none of that seems to be making it back to the workers upon whom the economy, and the corporate profit, is built.

James Stoeckmann, a senior practice leader at WorldatWork, believes that at our current pace full-time workers will make up a minority of the U.S. workforce within just 20 to 30 years.

Where have the full-time jobs gone? For the most part they have gone elsewhere. The high paying, secure, dependable manufacturing jobs are gone. They no longer exist in the United States, and sadly they do not even exist in the countries that now do our manufacturing. The whole point of going overseas was to capture a workforce that demanded no protections and had no preconceived notions of what it ought to be worth.

The biggest companies are able to hold employees hostage with the choice of taking less to do more, or taking a pink slip and watching their job transplanted to somewhere else.

At the same time the smallest companies lack the funds to adequately cover employees in the ways they were once accustomed. Banks are still refusing to lend and small business loans are still a shell of what they were a few years ago. Employers in this economic climate cannot afford to offer the security that once came with full-time work. In many cases they aren’t even able to guarantee full-time work.

Contract workers and part-time employees are replacing full-timers with occupational benefits. Desperate workers, often unemployed or underemployed for more than a year, are willing to take whatever scraps are offered. Meanwhile, some employers only have scraps to offer, while others are happy to simply keep whatever they can for themselves.

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