As far as counting part time people as employed or unemployed now -
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Who is counted as employed?
Not all of the wide range of job situations in the American economy fit neatly into a given category. For example, people are considered employed if they did any work at all for pay or profit during the survey week.
bls.gov
Are part-time workers counted in your survey?
Yes, however, the establishment survey does not have a specific category for part-time workers. Since the survey captures counts of all employees on the payroll, part-time employees are part of the total. They are not counted separately. The Current Population Survey does have a separate tally for part-time workers.
bls.gov
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So the BLS establishment survey stats don't break out part time at all. Your either working or your not. (But they are counted in the current population survey, and included in U6)
Apparently the specific BLS definition is working 34 hours or less (although state, and perhaps even federal law in certain areas might have different definitions)
"Based on data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in its Current Population Survey (CPS), of 141.7 million employed people in 2005, 24.7 million, 17.4 percent, fell into the part-time category, i.e., they worked fewer than 34 hours a week."
definitions.uslegal.com
I don't see anything about that definition changing from the past, but that can be an awfully hard thing to find, esp. when it didn't change, and I'd have to prove a negative. The same would apply to whether or not part-time workers where counted as unemployed.
Googleing "part-time workers were counted as unemployed" find only one hit.
And that one hit goes to "...the BLS calculated that if both discouraged workers and involuntary part- time workers were counted as unemployed, the unemployment rate would have been..."
books.google.com
google.com
Remove the quotes and you get a lot of hits, but I can't find a relevant one.
"part-time workers used to be counted as unemployed"
gets zero hits
as does
"part time workers used to be counted as unemployed"
I tried searching for changes in unemployment rates. I found all sorts of complaints about unemployment rates, including arguments that we should count involuntary part time workers are unemployed in the headline rate, but none of the arguments I've looked at say that we used to do so.
I looked at other countries methods and I can't find any that include involuntary part time employees (let alone ALL part time employees) as unemployed. But its not like this was a comprehensive search. Do you know of country that does count that way?
I do see that apparently the "discouraged worker" concept was added in the 60s (probably the biggest change that would decrease the headline rate), and I've seen claims (and thought myself) that the data had changed to include military people as employed (rather than to not include them at all), but the stats at bls.gov , seem based off the civilian workforce. Another change was apparently to remove prisoners from the workforce. (I suppose to the extent you have prison jobs you could even count them as employed, but I'm pretty sure that hasn't been done.)
Hmm as for the military issue, it appears that a separate unemployment rate includes the military, but not the headline rate.
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Barry, you are mostly wrong about your assertions on how BLS has changed the definition of the unemployment rate. Let’s go over them:
1. BLS under JFK created a category of unemployed called discouraged workers.
INCORRECT. Discouraged workers predates the 1960s as a concept. What BLS was criticized for in the 1960s was that some discouraged workers were counted as unemployed based on information they volunteered in the monthly household survey. Most discouraged workers were not counted as part of U5 (the old U3). When BLS piloted a new methodology to treat discouraged workers consistently as not being part of the labor force (and therefore not part of the unemployed), they found it changed the unemployment rate by at most one tenth of a percent, within the margin of error.
2. Under Clinton, BLS redefined the work force to include only that small percentage of “discouraged workers” who had been seeking work for less than a year.
INCORRECT. First of all, “work force” is not a precise term. Let’s use “labor force”, which is the sum of the employed and the unemployed. Discouraged workers have never (conceptually) been included as part of the U-3 unemployment rate. In the mid-1990s, BLS defined discouraged workers to be those who were NOT looking for work (and therefore not in the labor force and not part of the unemployment rate) BUT had looked for work, or been employed, sometime in the past year. Left out of the definition were people not in the labor force, who reported that they would like a job but had given up looking, and who had not been employed or done any jobseeking activity in the past year. This change had NO EFFECT on U-3. What BLS tried to do was to bring some kind of objective measure to differentiate discouraged workers from, for lack of a better term, slackers. Whether you agree that their definition is a good one, it is, at least, an objective measure.
3. (1983): BLS: Persons in the Armed Forces stationed in the United States will be included in the national labor force and employment totals and thus in the base for the overall unemployment rate. By adding millions of soldiers, sailors and marines to the Labor Pool, unemployment rate was driven down.
INCORRECT. BLS started publishing two unemployment rates, U5 (the old U3) and U5A (or something like that), which was slightly lower because it added in resident armed forces to the unemployed. Nobody paid any attention to the armed forces rate, once they stopped laughing. BLS dropped the alternative a number of years later. U5 (the old U3) was never affected by this temporary alternative.
(Year?) “Part-Time for economic reasons” used to be considered Unemployed — now, they are in a different category (”Part-Time for economic reasons”) and don’t count in U3.
INCORRECT. U3 and its predecessor U5 have never included part-time for economic reasons.
You owe me a beer.
And in answer to Chris’s point above about prisoners, BLS measures the civilian noninstitutionalized labor force and unemployment rate. Folks in institutions like prison aren’t counted...
ritholtz.com
I wish I had a more authoritative source, he mentions a BLS memo he sent (perhaps e-mailed) that responds to charges made about the changes in unemployment rates, but he doesn't post it.
hmm finally we might have some useful data from more than a blog comment
looking at
bls.gov
Changes in concepts and methods -
1945, 1954, 1955 - Technical and probably unimportant (in terms of the resulting rates) changes.
1957 - Move of two small groups (or most of the people in those groups) to count as "unemployed", thus slightly increasing the unemployment rate
1967 - This is probably the big change that decreased unemployment rate. In addition to technical changes, you have -
- People who only want seasonal employment (mostly students), where no longer counted as unemployed out of that season, but rather as not in the work force. People who are on strike, or otherwise have a job but aren't currently working where shifted from unemployed to employed. The lower age limit to be considered part of the work force was moved from 14 to 16.
1994 - A change in the definition of discouraged workers. The change would seem to mean there are less discouraged workers (as it adds additional criteria to meet), which would if it where the only change tend to increase the measured unemployment rate, but I believe the people not considered "discouraged", where moved to "marginally attached", which is also not counted as unemployed, so the impact would seem to be minimal.
Notice there is no note of changing to count involuntary part time as employed. Apparently they where always counted as employed. |
