In your opinion, should long term part time employees get modified benefits?

I have worked for employers who did just that. In my case, it was called PTO: paid time off, and the company didn't differentiate between sick time, vacations or personal days. Each employee earned an hour of PTO for a certain number of hours worked.

YOU are free to seek employment elsewhere, if you don't like what your company offers you. It's interesting that you feel you're entitled to more than what you're getting but aren't willing to go to that effort.

Its almost never going to happen.

They have a job, as contracted, for 'several years'. That seems like they are valued. Try leaving and find out if you actually are valued enough to be enticed to stay. Otherwise, no.

My opinion doesn't matter.

Some companies do this - and sounds good.

I think business owners and employees should be free to negotiate how they exchange labor for monetary compensation without me, you, or the government sticking our noses into it to demand that the compensation include certain things.

I think that it would be good for both parties if compensation included certain benefits like PTO, retirement benefits, etc - but it should be up to them.

Yes. Such workers should get the same proportion of benefits as full times get, so a worker doing 20 hours would get half of what a 40 hour worker gets.

The ONLY reason companies hire so many part timers is to try to cheat workers from benefits. Cheap bastards.