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View Full Version : Part-time jobs account for 97% of 2013 job growth



red states rule
08-06-2013, 03:47 AM
Can you say Obamacare?

Well Obama did promise to transform America. With this and his statement his energy polices would cause the cost of energy to soar - at least Obama is keeping some of his promises





Being on vacation last week meant that I missed the jobs report for July (http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/02/july-jobs-report-162k-jobs-added-unemployment-rate-drops-to-7-4-percent/), which turned out to be as unremarkable as most of those in the four-plus years of the so-called economic recovery. The media reports I did catch while on the cruise focused mainly on the fact that the jobs added in July missed the expectations of analysts, and not on the fact that adding only 162,000 jobs meant another extension of stagnation, as the US economy needs ~150,000 jobs added each month just to tread water, thanks to population growth. That’s not even a decent maintenance number, let alone the kind of job growth needed to put the chronically unemployed back to work.

The media reports also missed another trend in job reports, one caught by a former chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and reported by McClatchy’s Kevin Hall this morning (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/02/198432/most-2013-job-growth-is-in-part.html#.Uf-UcGRAS7g). Almost all of the job growth this year came in part-time work — and when we say “almost all,” we mean 97% of it:

The unemployment rate is measured by the separate Household Survey, and it fell two-tenths of a percentage point to 7.4 percent, its lowest level since December 2008. That’s due in part to slow growth in the labor force. The jobless rate is based on a sample of self-reporting from ordinary people across the nation, and it’s the Labor Department measure that shows a very troubling trend in hiring.

“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.”
And Hall says there has to be something driving that kind of trend, and thinks he knows what it is:

“There is something going on if such a large share of the hiring is part time,” Hall said. …

Hall speculated that the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, shorthanded as Obamacare, might be resulting in employers shifting workers to part-time status to avoid coming health care obligations.

“There’s been so much talk about the effects of Obamacare on part-time work,” he said. “This is such an unusual thing to see.”


http://hotair.com/archives/2013/08/05/part-time-jobs-account-for-97-of-2013-job-growth/