While they make up 25 to 35 percent of our workforce (or almost 34 million people), and thereby outnumber the employees of the Fortune 500 combined, the nation's part-timers remain the Rodney Dangerfields of the workplace. Their plight gets no respect, a situation we in labor education struggle to help change.

Invaluable in this campaign is a seminal research volume, a well-edited collection of 19 original essays rich in fresh insights into both the peril and potential of the fastest growing type of work about us.

Deliberately confined to the English-speaking industrial nations of the West (Canada, the UK, and the USA), the volume documents ongoing trends that point in both encouraging and yet also discouraging directions. Such contradictions have the editors call for "more enlightened public policies, greater accountability on the part of employers, and a more inclusive perspective on the part of the unions."

Part l provides a sweeping overview of part-time work in the North Atlantic Triangle.

Part ll offers five essays that sharpen the focus on individual nations.

Part lll hones in on demographic variables, its seven essays preoccupied with young workers, older workers, or women workers.

Part lV includes four occupational and occupational cases, including the service industries in this country, Ontario's elementary school system, and hospital nursing.

The concluding section, Part V, asks "What of the Future?" Its two essays highlight the uncertainties and cross-currents that characterize the scene.

Part-timers in the USA have steadily grown as a percent of our workforce since the late 1970s, caught up as they have been in a larger trend toward more low-paid jobs. On average males make only 58 percent of the hourly wage of full-timers; females, 76 percent. Fewer than 30 percent get either health benefits or a pension plan. Little wonder, accordingly, that over 25 percent want full-time jobs.

Thanks to the scholarly work of the volume's contributors we learn why women and minorities are overrepresented. We get to speculate about the possible impact of improvements in these jobs. We get beyond mere exposure of relevant myths and explore as well "how these myths are reproduced and sustained in employment practices, in state policies, in the family, and in the wider culture."

Labor educators will find especially intriguing Hilda Kahne's discussion of New Concept part time work, or jobs that share the characteristics of a regular job attachment, wages prorated to that of equivalent full-time work, and payment of at least some benefits.

Should unions finally recognize the strategic value of promoting such work for newly organized part-timers the labor movement might just turn then corner.

Handicapped by interminably long paragraphs, undue repetition, and uneven appeal, the essay collection is not for the casual reader or beginning student of the subject. Academics, however, who understand how central the topic is to the unfolding 21st century workplace scenario will definitely want to add this book to their "must skim" shelf.

Working Part-time: Risks and Opportunities. Edited by Barbara D. Warme, Katherina L.P.Lundy, and Larry A. Lundy. New York: Praeger, 1992. 322pp. Bibliography. Index. Cloth. $XX.XX.