Is the full-time American job going the way of the dodo? The signs aren’t exactly heartening.
Consider the jobs report released Friday. The United States added 195,000 new jobs in June, it said, including 322,000 new part-time jobs — a number that comprises only part-timers who want full-time work but can’t find it. Assuming my grade-school arithmetic skills haven’t completely eroded, that suggests that the number of full-time jobs actually declined.
Critics of Obamacare have a ready explanation: The 30-hour-a-week cutoff of the now-postponed employer mandate — which requires many employers to either provide health-care coverage for employees who work at least that much or to pay a penalty — was compelling employers to reduce workers’ hours. That mandate, the Wall Street Journal editorialized, gave businesses “an incentive to hire more part-time workers.”
If the employer mandate really were the problem, then the lot of the American worker wouldn’t look so grim. There is, to be sure, much anecdotal evidence that some employers are cutting workers’ hours to avoid the mandate. A closer look at the long-term rise of part-time work, however, makes clear that the decline of working hours and the rise of low-wage work reflect structural changes in the U.S. economy.
Of the 195,000 jobs created in June, fully 75,000 came in “Leisure and Hospitality” — Labor Department-speak for hotels, restaurants, fast-food joints and bars. Workers in this sector averaged just 26.1 hours a week — a figure that hasn’t changed in the past 12 months, even as Obamacare’s deadlines drew nigh. Thirty-seven thousand retail jobs were added, and these workers put in, on average, 31.3 hours a week. Workers in manufacturing, by contrast, had full-time jobs, averaging 40.9 hours a week — but 6,000 manufacturing jobs were eliminated in June.
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