OBAMACARE,THE SEQUESTER and part time employment
It is time to get serious.
There are widespread claims that firms are cutting hours worked and converting full time jobs into part time jobs because of Obama-care.
So what does the data say. Below is a table of unpublished data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of part time employment by private and government employers. The government data includes state, local and federal part time workers but I have also broken out federal part time workers in a separate column. The data also is not seasonally adjusted, so generally month to month comparisons are meaningless and one should make comparisons between a month in 2013 and the same month in 2012.
The data shows that private part time employment in 2013 is lower in every month but one than it was in the same month of 2012. Moreover, federal part time employment was just the opposite, rising in every month but January. In particular, in June and July, 2013, when firms were supposedly cutting hours worked to avoid having to pay for employee health insurance over 100% of the increase in part time employment stemmed from federal government employment. This in turn was generated by employee furloughs brought about by the sequestration.
So over the last few months when Obama-care was supposedly causing a surge in part time employment the data shows that private part time employment actually fell, just the opposite of what is being claimed.
Overall, the data massively contradicts claims that Obama-care is responsible for the recent surge in part time employment. Moreover, it strongly supports the case that the recent increase in part time employment stemmed from the Sequester.
I can understand why papers like the Wall Street Journal will buy into such Republican misinformation, but I am really surprised that the New York Times appeared to accept the misinformation even though they were publishing good data on the sequester. But as far as anyone else is concerned, I see no reason to take you seriously unless you can show good, hard data demonstrating that the BLS data is wrong.
PS. The Pentagon announced that it is reducing the number of furlough days DOD civilians must take from 11 to 6.
spencer,
ObamaCare doesn’t kick in until 2014. Let’s revisit the data then.
Hi Angrybear..
I’m glad to see other people looking at employment numbers. I hadn’t even thought to look at private vs. government part-time vs. full-time numbers. Thanks!
You may know this, but you don’t mention it in your article… The number of part-time workers you mention are INVOLUNTARY part-time workers, that is, people who want full-time work, NOT people who are working part-time by choice.
One thing that is not mentioned by most of the part-time alarmists is that the number of people working part-time for non-economic reasons, that is, by choice, has been going up… This may be because of the huge increase in the number of 55+ people in the population, many of whom PREFER to work part-time or are working part-time to supplement a Social Security or Disability check… but I don’t know that for sure. There are about 300,000 more part-time workers in total in July 2013 vs. June 2013, but they are all in the “part-time by choice” bucket.
May I ask where you got your data? Did you use Dataferret at the Census site or something else?
My total number is the sum of involuntary and voluntary par ttime workers.
I get my data via Haver Analytics– a professional data service– for the most part, but I actually contacted the BLS for this data and they sent me an email
with the data file.
I’m a professional semi-retired business economist.