A few weeks ago I wrote about several measures of the labor market, and whether the labor market was actually doing well. It’s a good idea to look beyond the headline unemployment rate, but even looking at alternative unemployment rates, labor force participation, employment rates, and unemployment insurance claims, I concluded in that post that the labor market is still looking healthy.

Lately I have heard another objection to the job growth numbers: part-time employment. I’ve seen this pop-up a few times on Twitter lately and just yesterday my co-blogger Scott Buchanan (in a post primarily about excess savings) stated that “much of the jobs creation this year has been in the part-time category.”

So is the jobs recovery mostly about part-time jobs? What is going on?

First things first: most of the data on part-time employment is from the household survey. There’s already a lot of noise in the household survey, due to the sample size, and part-time workers are a small share of the workforce, so expect it to be even noisier. In short, don’t trust one-month fluctuations too much. Furthermore, most of the data folks look at is seasonally adjusted. That’s generally good practice! But again, for a small number in a small sample, the seasonal adjustment factors won’t be perfect. Don’t read too much into one or a few months of data.

Let’s get the big picture first. How much of the labor force in the US is usually working part-time (defined in most data as less than 35 hours per week)? As usual FRED is the best place to go for graphing BLS data:

Continue reading →