Job Growth With Declining Hours Worked an Artifact of Obamacare
Lots of part-time jobs
After hovering near a ho-hum 370,000 for most of 2012, the four-week average of claims has fallen abruptly to 336,750, the lowest since the end of 2007. At first blush, that seems to correlate with robust job gains of close to 200,000 per month in the first four months of the year.
Yet a closer look at the April employment report raises a big question: Why are jobs growing so much faster than the number of hours workers are clocking?
In April, aggregate hours worked fell 0.4%, the sharpest such decline since the start of the jobs recovery. One shouldn't make too much of a single month's data point, but over the first four months of the year, private payrolls grew 75% faster than total hours worked.
If job growth had only kept pace with total hours over the past four months, then the U.S. would have added a modest 463,000 private nonfarm jobs vs. the reported 813,000.
Hide Comments (0)
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post commentsMute this user?
Ban this user?
Un-ban this user?
Nuke this user?
Un-nuke this user?
Flag this comment?
Un-flag this comment?