I was fiddling around yesterday and happened to notice something a little odd:
Average hours of work per week fell sharply in January. It's now lower than it's been since the Great Recession with the exception of a single month at the start of the pandemic.
But then, because of my musing about seasonal adjustments, I got curious about what the raw numbers looked like:
Average weekly hours were actually down to 33.7, but the seasonal adjustment raised it 0.4 hours to to 34.1. Sure enough, the average change from December to January has been -0.4 hours over the past ten years:
Since average hours worked routinely drops by 0.4 hours per week in January, that gets backed out to produce a "true" seasonally-adjusted look at things.
That was kind of boring, wasn't it? But I'm curious about why weekly hours fell so dramatically. Maybe it's just a one-month artifact and things will be back to normal in February. Or maybe it means employers really are cutting back on hours. Stay tuned.
If you did this for every yearly two-month interval, you'd see roughly the same trend.
How is this affected by weather? I got a snow day last month but since I still got paid maybe it still counted as hours worked.
Employment up, hours down (both seasonally adjusted)--could be a wash.
Adjusting for seasonality? Meh.
Adjust for inflation!
:-;
Does paid time off get counted in hours worked? Is this what gets backed out in the corrected numbers? I noticed this year the amount of January absences attributed to workers taking advantage of their annually re-stocked PTO seems considerably higher than in recent years. Or maybe it’s just felt more because the headcount was lower than normal going into January?