Each month, the U.S. Census Bureau for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) surveys about 60,000 households and asks people 15 years and older whether they are employed and, if so, if they are working full-time or part-time. The BLS defines full-time employment as working at least 35 hours per week. This survey, referred to as both the Current Population Survey and the Household Survey, is what produces the monthly unemployment rate, labor force participation rate, and other statistics related to activities and characteristics of the U.S. population.
For many months after the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, the Household Survey produced less-than-happy news about the labor market. The unemployment rate didn't start to decline until October 2009, and nonfarm payroll job growth didn't emerge confidently from negative territory until October 2010. Now that the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.8 percent—much faster than most would have expected even a year ago—the attention has turned to the quality, rather than quantity, of jobs. This scrutiny is driven by a stubbornly high rate of people employed part-time "for economic reasons" (PTER). These are folks who are working part-time but would like a full-time job. Several of my colleagues here at the Atlanta Fed have looked at this phenomenon from many angles (here, here, here, here, and here).
The elevated share of PTER has left some to conclude that, yes, the economy is creating a significant number of jobs (an average of more than 228,000 nonfarm payroll jobs each month in 2014), but these are low-quality, part-time jobs. Several headlines have popped up over the past year or so claiming that "...most new jobs have been part-time since Obamacare became law," "Most 2013 job growth is in part-time work," "75 Percent Of Jobs Created This Year [2013] Were Part-Time," "Part-time jobs account for 97% of 2013 job growth," and as recently as July of this year, "...Jobs Report Is Great for Part-time Workers, Not So Much for Full-Time."
However, a more careful look at the postrecession data illustrates that since October 2010, with the exception of four months (November 2010 and May–July 2011), the growth in the number of people employed full-time has dominated growth in the number of people employed part-time. Of the additional 8.2 million people employed since October 2010, 7.8 million (95 percent) are employed full-time (see the charts).
The pair of charts illustrates the contribution of the growth in part-time and full-time jobs to the year-over-year change in total employment between January 2000 and October 2014. By zooming in, we can see the same thing from October 2010 (when payroll job growth entered consistently positive territory) to October 2014. Job growth from one month to the next, even using seasonally adjusted data, is very volatile.
To get a better idea of the underlying stable trends in the data, it is useful to compare outcomes in the same month from one year to the next, which is the comparison that the charts make. The black line depicts the change in the number of people employed each month compared to the number employed in the same month the previous year. The green bars show the change in the number of full-time employed, and the purple bars show the change in the number of part-time employed.
During the Great Recession (until about October 2010), the growth in part-time employment clearly exceeded growth in full-time employment, which was deep in negative territory. The current high level of PTER employment is likely to reflect this extended period of time in which growth in part-time employment exceeded that of full-time employment. But in every month since August 2011, the increase in the number of full-time employed from the year before has far exceeded the increase in the number of part-time employed. This phenomenon includes all of the months of 2013, in spite of what some of the headlines above would have you believe.
So, in the post-Great Recession era, the growth in full-employment is, without a doubt, way out ahead.
By Julie Hotchkiss, a research economist and senior policy adviser at the Atlanta Fed
Author's note: The data used in this post, which are the same data used to generate the headlines linked above, reflect either full-time or part-time employment (total hours of work at least or less than 35 per week, respectively). They do not necessarily reflect employment in a single job.