Bunhill: Contingent employees

AN article appears in this month's Management Today analysing the phenomenon of the 'contingent employee' - in the shape of the growing numbers of self-employed and part- timers.

Traditional job security is disappearing, and the relationship between employer and employee is becoming shorter- term.

'The employment consequences have been grim for many,' says the author, Gerard Egan.

But not, I suspect, for him. As a former Catholic priest and now professor of organisational studies and psychology at Loyola University, Chicago, Egan is one of the few lucky people to have held not one, but two cast-iron jobs for life.