The monthly jobs report has loads of stuff in it, and I like to highlight something different each time. This month, it's average weekly hours worked:
Riddle me this: We supposedly have millions of job openings that companies can't fill. That being the case, you'd think that in the meantime they'd be giving their workers more hours. And yet, for the past year the number of hours worked has gone steadily down.
So: Four million more job openings than usual and half a million new jobs this month, but real wages are down and hours worked are down. How does this make sense?
Along with the anecdotes I see out there among family and friends, this aligns with employers working to avoid the full-time employee hour requirements/expectations. When my mother was in a retirement facility NONE of the workers was full time. It is pretty sh***y of them but, on the other hand, why are florists and Dollar General in the the health insurance, etc business.
We have a winner. Precisely.
This is exactly it. Employers don't want more *full time* workers they have to pay benefits for and stuff. They want a large pool of *part time* minimum-wage workers. So rather than just move a couple of people to full time, they bitch and moan about how the labor market is too tight and everyone's gotten lazy.
Minimum wage??? Nope. Minimum benefits
Keeping people at, say, 30-35 hours a week means you can get a couple extra hours out of them at need and not have to pay overtime. Many employers seem extremely adverse to paying overtime as if they regard it as a personal insult.
Perhaps there are additional expenditures/whatnot required when an employee crosses a certain number of even regular hours worked , which employers would like to avoid, which they were unwilling or unable to avoid during the pandemic.
If you answer the question of why hours worked rose like it did, perhaps you will arrive at the answer to why they have come back down again.
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BA.5.
Clarification: Opening up meant lots of ppl calling in sick from getting COVID. With each variant getting more infectious and greater antibody evasion, more people are catching COVID repeatedly and calling in sick.
Which is notably weaker than Delta a year prior. Your point is dead.
Fuck off troll. The virus can be getting weaker (usually defined as "killing or hospitalizing fewer people") and still make people sick enough to call out from work. If the virus is both getting "weaker" and yet also spreading more widely, it's possible that the number of people in our economy not dying or being hospitalized for weeks/months is grossly outnumbered by the number of people calling out sick for a few days.
Not sick enough. You need a omicron style burst to add up enough.
People are still getting COVID and getting too sick to work. Not everyone is vaccinated, and even vaccinated people can get pretty sick. It's really hard to fill out a schedule when you have several people getting sick again and again.
It's no surprise that hours are down. Most employers like to run employees at around 30 hours a week so they can call in people to meet peak demand without worrying about having to pay overtime. Most people who get hourly wages rarely get 40 hours a week, and their big complaint is not getting enough hours.
When the Great Resignation cut the workforce, employers had to increase hours and pay overtime now and then. Now that more people are back to work, employers can relax and keep their employees on short hours to maintain slack.
If this sounds weird, consider how often your car ever produces its peak power output. Most owner manuals suggest never running at peak output for more than a limited period, and, if your car has a tachometer, there's usually a red line above which one should minimize operation. It's like this with employers and employees. They want a high peak output, but they don't want to run at that level more than absolutely necessary.
Out sick is still out sick. My team at work has been short handed due to covid, it's still putting folks out of action for 1-2 weeks so the healthy folks had to pick up the slack.
Baaaaa?
I don’t think that’s a mystery. Workers are already overburdened and can’t/won’t take more work.
I don’t know if it’s every industry, but health care, travel, shipping, and childcare, among others, have notoriously overworked employees the past two years. Workers either literally can’t take more hours or won’t for personal, health, or emotional reasons.
This really just goes back to Kevin’s long standing question, why aren’t salaries rising more? If childcare stops a worker from taking more hours, why not pay more to cover childcare?
Many businesses, in my experience, have no trouble providing degraded or fewer services. Answering the telephone, for example. The patient/customer wants help? Well, s/he is welcome to spend 35 minutes on hold. If not, it wasn't that important.
The nearby theater no longer has a ticket office outside. You go in to the concession stand, wait behind a dozen or so people getting their drinks and popcorn, and finally are permitted to buy your ticket so you can see the movie.
Let me also gripe briefly about a chain of grocery stores, which has seen fit to install shelves on top of their other shelves, which by design, NOBODY CAN REACH. (Well, maybe Brittany Griner, but I hear she's unavailable...) They have signs warning people not to try to reach these shelves; you need to contact a store employee, who will bring a portable staircase to the shelf in question and hand down the item you wanted to look at, and perhaps buy. And good luck in finding one, then waiting etc etc.
Boban Marjanovic erasure.
You're a good guy, Monty. But sometimes I wish you'd be a little less blunt.
I am assuming those numbers are for all employees which includes salaried. For those not getting raises, encouragement to "take some time for yourself" is a cheap way to retain employees. Personally I know the amount of bullshit not worth having meetings I need to attend has been reduced compared to early on in the pandemic.
Well it has been elevated well above previous era's for months.......one thing I will say about the post 2000 economy, it's less dynamic. Technological base has to grow at such a speed for debt to be serviced. If not, your a government regulated entity, which we are now.
Spitballing here, but maybe workers are choosing to work less? Which would reduce wages, even if wage rates actually are going up.
Anecdote: my wife left her salaried position working 70-80 hours per week. She's now a temp doing 30 hours/week from home. Her wages went down substantially. "All" she's got to show for it is some physical and mental health. And really, who needs that sh#t, amirite?
I know, I know, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". But stories like that could explain how the "Great Resignation" narrative is actually true, and employers really are scrambling even as hours and real wages drop.
Real wages are a government illusion. It's impossible to actually know. When inflation collapses and real wages surge, neither are actual true.
I think a lot of women in particular have had to move to part time or find jobs with more flexibility because child care is so hard to find in a lot places now.
I don't think this is such a mystery. As we see from the chart, around April 2020 average hours worked per week started going up significantly. This was probably because many workers in stores, restaurants, tourism, etc., who often work fewer hours, were laid off. Now as they are being rehired, we are slowly returning to the pre-Covid average.
It is kind of funny where Kevin Drum chooses to find trend lines sometimes. Often he draws a line based on the pre-pandemic part of the graph and tries to see where we stand now relative to that trend. This time no.
Regression to the mean of 34.5 hours (just below the kick in of benefits). What is the mystery?
Could the number of jobs worked per person be going up even as hours and wages per job goes down? Like if someone used to work 1 job for 40 hours per week for $15/hr, and now is working 3 jobs for 20 hours per week at $12/hr, all of the following would be true:
- Hours per job went down from 40 to 20
- Wages per job hour went down from $15 to $12
- The individual involved still can keep up with inflation, since he/she is earning $720/wk now instead of $600/wk
- The individual involved is exhausted and pissed off at this economy, since he/she is working a lot more just to keep up with rising prices
The latter situation definitely represents something "bad" in most people's eyes, even if our Corporate Overlords prefer it to the former situation (because lower fringe benefits, no healthcare requirement, etc.).
no benefits....so health insurance fully out of pocket unless picked up by Obamacare.
no unemployment....
and you may be stuck paying the payroll tax yourself if you want credit for Social Security.
ACA requires employers help pay for healthcare when a worker reaches 30 hours/week (or 130/month). Employers have responded by hiring 29 hours/week temps with no benefits. What's hard about that?
Yes.
Would be more interesting to look at hourly workers vs. salaried workers. As above, hourlies are averaging to whatever level employers need to get below required benefits (not new news). The bump up during the pandemic...
Salaried workers get slammed during high need but low hourly worker availability. So the return of workers might be allowing salaried people to return to a more normal 45-50 hour work week as opposed to 60 hours.
O/T, but that strikes me as badly designed provision. It would've made more sense to simply require employers to be spending a certain percentage of payroll on qualified health insurance benefits, or pay the difference to the government.
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I'm not sure if it's on point, but perhaps worth mentioning - new jobless claims are averaging about 1 million per month - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-04/us-jobless-claims-rise-slightly-near-highest-since-november
Jobless claims are when employers LAY OFF workers. (An employee who is fired, or quits, can't claim unemployment.) So employers, in this **tight** job market, are still laying off employees in significant numbers.
In some states there are laws that allow you to collect unemployment even if you are fired for cause in certain circumstances. Also if you are fired because you missed too much work due to injury or illness.
There are a lot of states where the system has a bias toward employees in UI disputes so unless the employer has documented proof of illegal or tortuous behavior on the part of a fired employer, any UI hearing with likely be decided in favor of the employer. Often employers don't even bother to show up for a hearing so the employee wins by default, Of course there are states where the opposite is true (looking at Florida as a major offender)
No they aren't necessarily layoffs. Understand the issue with them and why they are distorted right now.
Because companies would rather lose business than give an inch to workers. This is not a tough riddle.
I wonder how the initial Payroll Protection Plan might have affected unemployment?
Thats for another day
Locally the number of hours worked is not hard to understand
First and foremost - our local mall has cut hours so that all stores open at 11am and close at 8pm. That means each store can operate with 1 full time associate and 1 part timer that might cover Sat/Sun
This is far different than that 9am to 9pm 12 hour day or even 91m to 10pm.
Then there's my grocery store. It used to be 24 hour now its 6am to 9pm. The theory there was that if they had overnight stockers they could also ring a register sale up then go back to stocking. They also just announced no more 6am opening (that was reserved for those who wished to shop early to avoid the COVID crowds - seniors and those imuno-compromised). Now its 7am to 9pm.
But even in the fast food industry quality part time help is hard to come by.
There's a number of reasons for hours worked declining. You take millions of folks out of the work force and hours worked ARE going to decline. THIS is what COVID did
No, your wrong. It did the opposite.
You're looking at averages. After the pandemic, the hours worked jumped up, and it is now returning to its traditional baseline. This suggests a bunch of people are getting paid overtime in some jobs and there are job openings for those jobs which is gradually reducing the number of people getting overtime.
Wages are going down because less overtime is being paid and because it was the low-paying jobs that got laid off first, and the low-paying jobs that are currently being filled fastest.
Theory states that all the openings indicate an increased demand for labor, i.e. an outward shift of the demand curve, so hours worked and wages should increase.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.