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No, part-time work is not suddenly booming

The Wall Street Journal is at it again:

Burned Out, More Americans Are Turning to Part-Time Jobs

Part-time work is exploding. The number of Americans working part time rose by 1.2 million in December and January compared with the preceding months, according to the Labor Department. Most of that increase—857,000 workers—was driven by people who worked part time by choice, not because they were unable to find full-time work or their hours were cut.

The total number of people working part time voluntarily—22.1 million in January—is now almost six times the 4.1 million who are working part time but would prefer full-time hours. That is the highest ratio in two decades.

Here's a look at voluntary part-time employment over the past two decades:

There is literally no story here. Most of the tiny January spike is due to the annual benchmarking process, new seasonal adjustment factors, and a couple of other technical changes. And even at that, all it tells us is that voluntary part-time work currently accounts for 14.0% of the workforce. In January 2010 it accounted for 14.0% of the workforce. In January 2000 it accounted for 14.0% of the workforce.

(And where did they come up with that ridiculous statistic about the number of voluntary part-timers being six times the number who would like more hours? This is literally meaningless.)

Why does the Journal insist on writing stories like this? All it takes is 30 seconds of FREDwork to see that nothing special is going on. Workers aren't cutting hours because they're burned out. Nor is 25 the new 35:

Don't take this chart seriously. It doesn't have enough granularity to show very much, and the January number probably spiked slightly for the same technical reasons as the number for part-time workers. Still, it certainly doesn't support the notion that droves of full-time workers are cutting back to part-time hours.

I really don't get this stuff. It's not ideological, since a switch to part-time hours doesn't confirm anything either liberal or conservative. Is it just a desperate search for a trend story, any trend story? I'd ask the Journal, but I imagine that would be about as useful as asking the Teamsters where Jimmy Hoffa's body is buried.

12 thoughts on “No, part-time work is not suddenly booming

  1. Altoid

    Well, let's think this through a little. WSJ is aimed at managers and owners. It's a Murdoch paper. The Murdoch MO has always been to develop "engagement" by amplifying priors (like almost everything else in media these days, but that's for another time).

    One prior of the aforesaid target readership is that workers, as a group, are lazy sods (in contrast with managers and owners, who are of course selfless stakhanovite heroes of capitalist production and distribution, another of the readership priors; broadly speaking, of course). This is an especially resonant theme now, because managers and owners are, we're told, having such a hard time finding and retaining staff and have been talking quite a bit about that.

    So I think most likely this falls into the category of readership-fluffing, intended to strengthen the attachment of this group to the WSJ. It also gives some of them something to tell their own bosses about why they can't find and keep the few good employees they managed to fish out of the cesspool, if they ever need that. Employee-blaming is always a good stance for the WSJ.

    That's only a guess because I haven't read it and I'm not about to pay explicitly for seeing a Murdoch product. I did have access for a while some time ago and can see the headlines, and while I know the general opinion has long been that WSJ is editorially insane but reportorially sound and even enterprising, I think a bit of the Fox ethos has leaked over to the paper so that some stories on the reportorial side are there for corporate-promotional purposes.

  2. ddoubleday

    It IS ideological. The WSJ is reflecting the view of the wealthy that too many people don't want to work hard, they just want to work enough to get by, and that we therefore need to make it harder for people to get by on part-time work. Simple.

    1. Citizen Lehew

      I think it also paints a picture in their readers' minds that *something* is wrong with the economy. Which is of course their job at all times when the president is a member of the Demmycrat Party.

  3. rick_jones

    I'd ask the Journal, but I imagine that would be about as useful as asking the Teamsters where Jimmy Hoffa's body is buried.

    Well, let's find-out. The article's author bio lists an email address. Having sent the author an email, and cc'ing you on it, we can await a response.

  4. Jasper_in_Boston

    I really don't get this stuff. It's not ideological, since a switch to part-time hours doesn't confirm anything either liberal or conservative.

    Kevin: if you spent about three miliseconds thinking about this, it should be obvious that a spike in part-time work can (and will) be spun by MAGA as a sign that people cannot get full time work. In other words, the Biden economy sucks.

  5. megarajusticemachine

    I would question this alone: "people who worked part time by choice, not because they were unable to find full-time work or their hours were cut." Regardless, yes, there's little to no point listening to the WSJ on anything. My guess here is also that they want to reassure the captains of industry that no one wants to work so they're correct in trying to keep more workers under-employed at part time only, to save on benefits.

  6. Altoid

    Not totally OT here is the report I heard this morning about an emerging trend in corporate America: firing people by not actually firing them, but reassigning them to another part of the country so they'll quit. This tactic not coincidentally cuts down on severance pay.

    And it goes along with an observation Scott Galloway made recently that back-to-the-office is in practice a disguised and unannounced form of downsizing because it encourages self-deportation from particular jobs.

    WSJ is the official daily journal of the people who dream up and carry out these moves. Every word in it, whether news division or editorial-page drivel, has to be read with that foremost in mind.

  7. Kevin McAuliffe

    Well, this one lady named Eve told me I could make lots of money working part-time. So maybe I'll join the movement.

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