Today brings another edition of Wall Street Journal Watch™. The topic this morning was people who have to work two jobs to stay afloat:
Sam Lalevee was scraping by in his job at a call center in Raleigh, N.C., when his rent jumped to $1,000 a month from $800. So he got a second job doing light and sound at a comedy club, joining a growing number of people who need more than one job to make ends meet in the postpandemic economy.
....The comeback of multiple-job holders speaks to some of the mixed currents in an economy that still boasts a growing job market, but has come with higher prices on a broad variety of goods and services, and essentials like rent and insurance.
The article is accompanied by this chart:
This is a badly designed graphic because they've insisted on starting the y-axis at zero. But put that aside. Technically speaking, nothing so far is actually wrong. The number of multiple jobholders has gone up since the start of the pandemic.
But in this case context is everything. Here's what things really look like:
The number of people with multiple jobs plummeted at the start of the pandemic and has now recovered to its old value. Over the long term, the number of multiple jobholders has declined steadily for the past 30 years.
Now, once you have this context you can decide for yourself what's really happening. You can correctly say (a) multiple jobholding has gone down substantially since 1994, (b) multiple jobholding flattened out around 2015, or (c) multiple jobholding dropped at the start of the pandemic and has now recovered.
What I think you can't do, if you're honest, is show just the last four years of this chart and then imply that the gig economy (or work from home or high unemployment or Bidenomics or...) is causing an unprecedented flurry of people getting second jobs in order to survive. That's just not the case.
Why would you make a series that peaked at 5% anyhow?
You can, of course, do the same jigger of axes with nearly any economic indicator and pretend the pandemic never happened. It's especially common (though hardly unique) with the GOP.
The way they cut off their chart at 2020 is a lot like how you selectively cut off your charts, too, especially when you were trying to make a point about inflation or employment.
One flaw in tracking % of employed is that you're missing the total number of people with multiple jobs. So when you state, "the number of multiple jobholders has declined steadily for the past 30 years", you're actually wrong.
In 1994, the annual average of total persons with multiple jobs was 7.2M. In 2023 this was 8.1M. The average trailing 12 months from July 2024 is 8.3M. The BLS series you want is LNU02026619.
Is this a hockey stick...
( ´◡‿ゝ◡`)
so, you're saying, the murdochs are trafficking in cooked books no different than the international conference on climate change.
The line doesn't look flat after 2015. It looks like it's going up slowly, except for a brief pandemic-related drop that is now over.
Yeah, it looks flat from 2010 to 2015 then a climb until the pandemic. A singe regression line doesn't really represent the data.
What happened when KD asked WSJ about these observations? Do they not respond to questions about it?
Demographics?
I'd think young people starting out are more likely to have two (or more) jobs. With the tail end of the baby boom retiring, so younger people make up a larger percent of the workforce?
And note, this is per person, not per household.
Looking at Kevin's full graph, It's obvious that the number of people with multiple jobs goes up when the job market is strong and falls when the job market is week. It was rising before the economic collapse in 2007 where is started falling only to stop falling and start rising in 2014. It fell when unemployment exploded due to covid, and is now rising now that we have the strongest job market in the history of the US. And the wall st journal example of a guy getting a 2nd job working the lights at a theater is not the type of job someone gets because he needs more income. That's a job people get because they enjoy it and would volunteer to do it in many circumstances.
Does it even matter how many jobs people have? I don't think so. What matters is how many work hours they work totally in an average week. Too much work will be detrimental to health and well being and family life. But the number of employers by itself tells us nothing.