8/2/13, "Most 2013 job growth is in part-time work, survey suggests," McClatchy, Kevin G. Hall
"“Over the last six months, of the net job creation, 97 percent of that is part-time work,” said Keith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “That is really remarkable.”
Hall is no ordinary academic. He ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs report, from 2008 to 2012. Over the past six months, he said, the Household Survey shows 963,000 more people reporting that they were employed, and 936,000 of them reported they’re in part-time jobs.
“That is a really high number for a six-month period,” Hall said. “I’m not sure that has ever happened over six months before.”
The Establishment Data Survey provides the headline-grabbing hiring number that’s most cited in news media, but it doesn’t distinguish between part-time and full-time work. Similarly, the Household Survey doesn’t say whether the part-time workers have found new jobs or represent workers whose employers have shifted them from full time to part time."...
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Conover Forbes chart with article below is through June 2013. Zero Hedge chart is posted below Forbes article updated through July 2013. Part time hiring remained higher than full time in July 2013. Zero Hedge shows 7 months of 2013 part time hiring was 77%.
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7/31/13, "Who Can Deny It? Obamacare Is Accelerating U.S. Towards A Part-Time Nation," Forbes, Chris Conover
"What should immediately be obvious to even someone without a shred of statistical training is how deviant the 2013 experience is compared to the past. For every new FT job added to the economy, there were 4.3 PT jobs added!...
As U.S. News and Report’s editor in chief Mort Zuckerman argues ”At this stage of an expansion you would expect the number of part-time jobs to be declining, as companies would be doing more full-time hiring.” As of July 2013, average gross domestic product growth rate annualized over the past 15 quarters (2%) was the weakest GDP growth since World War II. Similarly, the civilian workforce-participation rate has dropped by 2.2 percentage points since the recession ended. “Such a decline amid a supposedly expanding economy has never happened after previous recessions.” So something unusual is clearly happening, and the timing of the 2013 surge in new PT employment relative to FT employment suggests that Obamacare is a culprit even if not the only one....
Whether the actual number turns out to be 650,000 or 2.3 million, forcing workers to cut back their hours of work and income is not good for them and is not good for the health of the American economy. Sure, one can trivialize these numbers by saying they are a tiny fraction of the entire U.S. workforce. But I encourage anyone tempted to do so to talk to someone who has gotten their hours slashed to see how they feel about their situation. My guess is that very few enduring this pain will judge that the purported benefits of Obamacare made their cutback in hours worthwhile.
And remember that this adverse effect is above and beyond that created by the huge work disincentives created by “ACA subsidy cliff” and Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion (which alone could reduce employment by nearly 1 million). We already have a “labor market stuck in the mud” with an employment-to-population ratio that has declined to levels not seen since the early 1980’s. Why in the world would we want to aggravate such a bleak situation by moving forward with a Rube Goldberg contraption of carrots and sticks that will reduce work effort even further?"...
Among Conover's updates:
7/31/13, "One other observation I should have made in the post itself is that the BLS defines PT as under 35 weekly hours whereas the ACA defines it as under 30 hours. To the degree employers are cutting back hours of existing PT workers (as BLS defines them), say by changing a 34 hour per week worker to 29 hours, the BLS count of PT workers will remain completely unchanged. This is yet another instance of how our available metrics may well be hiding a phenomenon that is much larger than it might appear."
(This Conover Forbes chart is Jan.-June 2013. Chart updated with July 2013 numbers from Zero Hedge is posted below. Part time remained stronger than full time.)
Chart by Chris Conover, Forbes, 7/31/13
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"In July (2013) we are sad to report that America's conversion to a part-time worker society is not "tapering": according to the Household Survey, of the 266K jobs created (note this number differs from the establishment survey), only 35% of jobs, or 92K, were full time. The rest were... not."...
8/2/13, "Obamacare Full Frontal: Of 953,000 Jobs Created In 2013, 77%, Or 731,000 Are Part-Time," Zero Hedge, Durden
"When the payroll report was released last month (6/13), the world finally noticed what we had been saying for nearly three years: that the US was slowly being converted to a part-time worker society. This slow conversion accelerated drastically in the last few months, and especially in June, when part time jobs exploded higher by 360K while full time jobs dropped by 240K. In July we are sad to report that America's conversion to a part-time worker society is not "tapering": according to the Household Survey, of the 266K jobs created (note this number differs from the establishment survey), only 35% of jobs, or 92K, were full time. The rest were... not.
What is worse, however, is when one looks at job creation broken down by "quality" in all of 2013. The chart below does the bottom line some justice: [7 month chart, Jan.-July 2013]
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