Part-Timer Facts In Employment Sitch

When looking at numbers, the EleBlog tends to lean toward UNadjusted (not seasonally adjusted, etc.).

So a quick check of what I read over the weekend — that a gain in part-timers was a big part of what had gone on in September — mystified me. On a not-adjusted basis, the number of workers who are part-timers but don’t want to be is actually DOWN vs. September 2011.

However, on a seasonally adjusted basis, here are selected numbers for Part-Time For Economic Reasons (i.e., involuntarily working P/T):

September 2011       9,270,000

August 2012              8,031,000

September 2012       8,613,000

This seems to indicate a month-to-month pick-up of 582,000 part-time jobs in September. The number is based NOT on reports from companies, but on the BLS’s phone survey of citizens.

So this is a Have-Your-Way number — whatever you want:

a. We’re down 600K part-time jobs in a year. Assuming many have been converted to F/T, that’s good (isn’t it?)

b. We’re up 600K part-time jobs in a month. Assuming these were newly created positions, that’s good (isn’t it?)

c. But the fact that the U-6 number is stuck at 14.7% (and it includes the economic-reasons P/T people) means that, relatively speaking, we’ve not really gained much — doesn’t it?

Source: http://electricalcontractor.com/?p=6404

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