As anyone who follows macroblog knows, we have been devoting a lot of attention recently to the issue of people working part-time for economic reasons (PTER), which means people who want full-time work but have not yet been able to find it. As of July 2014, the number of people working PTER stood at around 7.5 million. This level is down from a peak of almost 9 million in 2011 but is still more than 3 million higher than before the Great Recession. That doesn’t mean they won’t ever find full-time work in the future, but their chances are a lot lower than in the past.
Consider Pat, for example. Pat was working PTER at some point during a given year and was also employed 12 months later. At the later date, Pat is either working full-time, still working PTER, or is working part-time but is OK with it (which means Pat is part-time for noneconomic reasons). How much luck has Pat had in finding full-time work?
As the chart below shows, there is a reasonable chance that after a year, Pat is happily working full-time. But it has become much less likely than it was before the recession. In 2007, an average of 61 percent of the 2006 Pats transitioned into full-time work. The situation got a lot worse during the recession, and has not improved. In 2013, only 49 percent of the 2012 cohort of Pats had found a full-time job. The decline in finding full-time work is largely accounted for by the rise in the share of Pats who are stuck working PTER. In 2007, 18 percent of the Pats were still PTER after a year, rising to around 30 percent by 2011, where it has essentially remained.
Now, our hypothetical Pats are a pretty heterogeneous bunch. For example, they are different ages, different genders, different educational backgrounds, and in different industries. Do such differences matter when it comes to the chances of Pat finding a full-time job? For example, let’s look at Pats working in goods-producing industries versus services-producing ones. In goods-producing industries, the chance is greater that Pat will find full-time work (more jobs in goods-producing industries are full-time), and there is a bit more of a recovery in full-time job finding for goods-producing industries than for services-producing ones. But overall, the dynamics are similar across the broad industry types, as the charts below show:
As another example, the next four charts show the average 12-month full-time and PTER job-finding rates for all of our hypothetical Pats by gender and education. The full-time/PTER finding rates display broadly similar patterns across gender and education, albeit at different levels. (The same holds true across age groups but is not shown.)
People who find themselves working part-time involuntarily are having more difficulty getting full-time work than in the past, even if they stay employed. But it doesn’t seem that much of this can be attributed to any particular demographic or industry characteristic of the worker. The phenomenon is pretty widespread, suggesting that the problem is a general shortage of full-time jobs rather than a change in the characteristics of workers looking for full-time jobs.
By John Robertson, a vice president and senior economist, and
Ellyn Terry, an economic policy analysis specialist, both of the Atlanta Fed's research department