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comment by wasoxygen
wasoxygen  ·  3037 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Young white people are losing their faith in the American Dream

    The number of full time jobs, in a ratio to the number of part time ones, are down.

Okay. If we want to see bad news, we might assume that lots of people want to work full time but can't find full time jobs.

If we want to see good news, we might assume that people are choosing to work less and spend more time relaxing.

If we want to see reality as it is, we might decide that we don't have enough information to say that this is good or bad.

The article mentions that the ratio of part-time workers has been growing since data collection began in 1968, when 13.5% of workers were part-time. It's hard to say what the ideal ratio might be, if there is one. The article mentions the the pre-recession percentage (without saying why that's a good target) and goes on to pick the very minimum value of 16.6% in the depicted range, saying we are "just above halfway there." The same chart shows that if you instead pick the maximum pre-recession value, we are just about exactly there.

There are more 2007-present charts, curiously almost identical, then one depicting a "surge in part-time employment" during the last recession, the surge being exaggerated in two ways: 1) the chart index is not zero 2) the graph does not depict part-time employment, rather the ratio of part time employed, concealing the fact that the loss of full time positions caused most of the change in the ratio.

Here's a quiz: in this multi-year chart of part-time job count, can you find the "surge"?

That image comes from a FRED chart of all full-time and part-time data. I suggest (here and always) choosing the maximum available range of data, and also putting both categories on the same axis (by default they are scaled differently, exaggerating part-time counts).

Part time work shows, in my view, quite stable and slow growth, with a little blip in January 1994 (when data collection methods changed) and a little growth during the recession, level since then, giving a value today about what we would have seen if the slow growth of earlier decades had continued uninterrupted.

It's also worth asking why people are working part-time. The article provides a link to BLS, and with a few clicks one can find a table showing reasons for working below 35 hours.

Some reasons given are:

17% In school or training

14% Family or personal obligations (other than child-care problems, which contribute 3%)

12% Slack work or business conditions

10% Vacation or personal day

7% Could only find part-time work

It turns out that more people are counted as part-time workers because they are on vacation than because they couldn't find the full-time job they wanted. Overall, 79% of part-time workers cite non-economic reasons for their work hours.





bioemerl  ·  3037 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Question on those stats: are those just "people who work less than 35 hours" or is that "people with jobs with fewer than 35 hours?"

If there were a lack of full time jobs, most will take two part time jobs, and work "full time" despite not having a full time job.

Outside of that I really do like this post, I hadn't seen this info before.

wasoxygen  ·  3035 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    are those just "people who work less than 35 hours"

I suspect that it means people who work a total of 35 hours or less per week, but I haven't been able to find a copy of the Current Population Survey to confirm. The answer might be buried somewhere in the technical documentation.

I found this conversation interesting as well; I have heard the claim that part-time jobs replaced full-time jobs during the recent downturn, but never looked into it.