No, its bad scheduling. In your example you seem to be assigning the same amount of work to part-timers and full-timers then complaining that the part timers ta

No, its bad scheduling. In your example you seem to be assigning the same amount of work to part-timers and full-timers then complaining that the part timers take twice as long and make the full-timers wait. Well Duh! It's perfectly possible in big teams/projects to schedule tasks to part-timers, because you assign them shorter tasks or tasks that full-timers won't be waiting for immediately. I've been there several times. (The fact that sometimes task times are hard to estimate in advance cuts both ways; sometimes a part-timer could be waiting for a full timer to finish work because the full-timer got a task that turned out to take longer than estimated.) I'm not saying that at all, I'm saying in big projects where you divide tasks among a team it should be possible for a good manager to deal in part-timers. The smaller the team/project the harder it gets, but it's still possible. Why do you assume full-timers are "fully-invested", eg defined by project constraints and not time constraints? Balls. I've known plenty of full-timers who were out the door at 5pm. If a company wants workers to work over-time it has to agree a system before-hand and agree compensation, money and/or time off in lieu. Its the same for part-timers and full-timers, no difference. If a company is just rocking up to it's full timers and saying "oh the projects not finished so you have to work this weekend kthxbai" it's a bad company.