But the comparison is only superficially revealing: if a casual teaches for one day a week, he or she only counts as about one-fifth of a full timer.
In 1955, TRW recruited Mueller to work on missile-guidance radar – first on a university sabbatical, then from 1957 as a full-timer.
So a part-timer doing a four-hour duty will be getting £10.30, instead of the £30 he currently gets for taking out twice as much stuff, while at the same time receiving half the money of a full-timer doing exactly the same amount of work.
As an adjunct, I earned an average of $3,000 per course, give or take a few hundred dollars depending on the school, approximately one-third of the equivalent wages per course for a "full-timer".
Not that Valentine ever thought of Perez as anything but a full-timer.
A full-timer's pay might be as low as $35,000 a year.
"I think we part-timers can be everything a full-timer can be," Ms. Zendlovitz said during a break in a 10-hour teaching day.
He went back to India for 18 months, then returned to Silicon Valley and in 1999 began working as a full-timer on staff for Novell in San Jose.
When one department head asked me to take on a full-timer's load for part-time pay, I asked if the university would hire me as temporary full-time faculty.
In addition, female specialists viewed part-time work more positively than did male specialists, independent of whether they were a full-timer or a part-timer.
Part-time workers often are not as productive as full-timers, because they tend to be less skilled and less experienced.
