The Myth of a 'Part-Time Economy' Under Obama

[bigtree]

from The Atlantic:

Here's What Obama's 'Part-Time America' Really Looks Like
The president's critics love this talking point. But since 2010, full-time jobs are up 7.6 million, and part-time jobs have declined by more than 900,000.

Like a bad summer-pop earworm, some economic ideas get stuck in our heads for no good reason and refuse to go away.

Take, for example, the remarkably durable myth that Obama has presided over a "part-time economy," where full-time work has been devastated by his relentlessly anti-capitalist policies. The Atlantic has done our best to bust this myth, but there's no killing some summer earworms, and so, like a particularly terrible Top 40 DJ, here comes Mort Zuckerman, spinning the old track on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page.

It's impossible to briefly sum up Zuckerman's argument—"The Full-Time Scandal of Part-Time America"—which is a collage of bad stats and randomly drawn lines of causality. The gist is that the U.S. economy only makes part-time jobs now, and Obamacare is hastening the demise of full-time work.

The easiest way to fact-check the claim that part-time work is rising is to measure Americans working part-time who want to work full time—i.e. "for economic reasons." It turns out that the entire increase in part-time employment happened before Obamacare became a law in 2010. (Y-axis in 1,000s)



As for the claim that involuntary part-time work is replacing full-time work? I think these two lines tell you all you need to know (Y-axis in 1,000s, again):




read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/heres-what-obamas-part-time-america-really-looks-like/374356/

[enlightenment]

1. Would it be reasonable to discuss

what kind of full-time jobs?

It's great to have a full-time job (though I'd like to see the actual hours - thirty hours isn't that much more than twenty-nine, at the end of the week, even if 30 is full-time and 29 is part-time).

It's even better to have a full-time job that pays a decent wage and offers some chance of advancement.

The majority of employment over the past couple of years has been in healthcare - primarily at the lowest end of the wage scale within that broad category - and hospitality; food service, etc. This year there has been a bit of an increase in administrative support services as well.

The average number of hours that people work in this country has not changed appreciably since 2006 - it hovers right around 34.5 hours per week.

The average hourly wages for these jobs? $15/hr for an administrative support worker. Between $10 and $17/hr for healthcare workers (home health aides to nursing assistants). $9.63/hr for food service workers.

(This is all BLS data by the way - you have to dig it out so I'm not posting direct links. Here is a link to the Data Tools page: http://www.bls.gov/data/ )

So, assuming they work the average number of hours - 34.5 - these folks are earning between $1329 and $2346 a month. Or $15,948 to $28,952, annually.

That's not too bad I suppose, if you're young, healthy, and unencumbered, though various reports and articles seem to suggest that the majority of full-time jobs are closer to the lower end of that average.

I'm not criticizing the news, but I do think that if we're going to discuss the new job figures then we should be looking at the details rather than just cheering a broad - but fairly meaningless - number. The details suggest that while these new jobs may pull some out of abject poverty, they are far from anything that we used to consider a comfortable standard of living. And that's a problem.