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Chris Tilly
P art-time employment makes up a growing share of jobs in the United States. At first glance, this trend might appear to be driven by workers' preferences: aren't employers simply accommodating the wishes of housewives, students, retirees, and others who prefer short-hour schedules? This explanation might have been valid during the 1950's and the 1960's. However, since 1969, part-time jobs have expanded primarily because more employers view them as a means to cut labor costs, and not because more workers want them. In fact, involuntary part-time workers-part-time workers who would prefer full-time hours-account for most of the growth in part-time employment's share of the work force since 1969. To explain the continuing expansion of part-time employment, we must look to changes in labor demand, not labor supply.
Long-term growth
Part-time employees comprise almost one-fifth of the
U.S. work force. About 20 million people in the economy's
nonagricultural sectors worked part-time1 in
1989, making up 18.1 percent of persons at work. A full 92
percent of these part-timers reported that they usually
worked part time, and almost one-quarter of them-close to 5
million people-were involuntary part-time workers who would have
preferred a full time job. (These figures represent averages over
12 months; about twice as many people worked part time at some
time during the year.2
)
This excerpt is from an article published in the March 1991 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
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Footnotes
1 In this discussion, a Bureau of Labor Statistics
definition of part-time employment is used. Part-time workers
include everybody working fewer than 35 hours per week, except
for those who usually work full time but who have lost hours for
noneconomic reasons. Part-time workers are considered involuntary
if they report that they are working part time because of slack
work, plant downtime, starting or ending a job during the week
they are surveyed, or the inability to find a full-time job. The
data series is derived from the Current Population Survey, a
monthly survey of households conducted for BLS by the Bureau of the Census. It is only one of a number
of series on part-time work produced by BLS.
2 See Sylvia Lazos Terry, "Involuntary part-time work: new information form the Current Population Survey," Monthly Labor Review, February 1981, pp. 70-74.
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