Part-time work and industry growth (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, Mar. 1998

Headlines such as "Workers Feel the Tension of Trend to Part-Time Jobs" and "Many Workers Frustrated by Lack of Full-Time Jobs"¹ reflect a common concern that a large proportion of the jobs that have been created in the United States in recent years are part-time jobs. This concern may seem misplaced, because the proportion of the U.S. workforce that is working part time has not increased appreciably since the early 1980s. However, an important part of the story is the perception that much of the hiring done by fast-growing industries, which, to many, represent the future of the U.S. economy, is for part-time positions. There is some basis for this view. The following tabulation ranks nonagricultural industry divisions, from highest to lowest, according to the growth rates of their employment shares (that is, the industry’s growth rate minus the aggregate growth rate) between 1983 and 1993 and, again, by the proportion of their workforce that worked part time, on average, over the same period:²

		Relative growth rate

Services...........................................		1.2
Transportation, communications, and public utilities.........................		.4
Retail trade......................................		.4
Finance, insurance, and real estate................................................		.4
Construction...................................		.0
Wholesale trade.............................		-1.3
Manufacturing................................		-1.9
Mining..............................................		-5.2

		Proportion part time

Retail trade......................................		40.0
Services...........................................		30.5
Construction.....................................		23.2
Finance, insurance, and real estate...............................................		17.0
Transportation, communications, and public utilities.........................		14.0
Wholesale trade.................................................		13.6
Manufacturing................................		11.3
Mining..............................................		10.0

This excerpt is from an article published in the March 1999 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.

1 Both headlines appeared in Peter Behr and Judith Evans, "Workers Feel the Tensions of Trend to Part-Time Jobs," The Washington Post, Aug. 7, 1997, p. E1.

2 See the next section for definitions. The data are drawn from March Current Population Surveys (CPS’s). The redesign of the cps in 1994 makes 1993 a natural stopping point for the analysis in this article, but none of its conclusions appear to be contradicted by experience since 1993. The year 1983 was chosen as a beginning point because it is similar to 1993 in terms of the cyclical behavior of the unemployment rate and because the "modern" period in which the proportion of the workforce working part time was no longer increasing dramatically had clearly begun by then.