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While President Joe Biden has been celebrating U.S. economic success, many Americans are still unhappy about the economy. So who’s right? The most recent jobs report for February showed that while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 3.9%, job gains were higher than expected, with the total coming in at 275,000 versus the expected increase of 200,000. This data suggests there has been confusing growth of both jobs and unemployment at the same time.
Straight Arrow News contributor Larry Lindsey takes a closer look at the latest employment report numbers, attempting to clarify some of the data. He highlights the rosy job creation scenario of the part-timers and how these workers affect the employment situation.
Then came the question about, ‘Aren’t these part-time jobs?’ Well, it turns out there are two types of part-time jobs. One is people who are put on part-time because of slack economic conditions for various economic reasons in the company. Well, the number of people who are on part-time work because the businesses didn’t have enough business actually dropped by 46,000. Part-timers who are part-time by choice rose by 158,000. A lot of people don’t want full-time jobs. So we now have a labor market where people can work part-time or full-time of their choosing, and there is no real pressure on people being forced to work part-time because the economy is weak.
The rate of unemployment did tick up from 3.7% to 3.9% but that was almost entirely due to young people dropping out of the labor force or choosing not to work for some reason. The number of people under 25 who are reported working dropped 466,000. But the number of people over 25 who are working rose 328,000. If you have a lot of younger, mostly part-time workers dropping out, perhaps because they went back to school, but you have solid growth of employment for middle-aged people, that’s another sign of a very strong economy in a tight labor market.
