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Number of Underemployed is Stubbornly High
Julie Forster
Pioneer Press, June 9, 2011
View original article at www.twincities.com
Layoffs have tapered off and the unemployment rate is slowly dropping. But not counted in the official jobless rate is a persistently high number of people working part-time jobs who would gladly work full-time if they had the chance.
Leif Moser, 24, of St. Paul graduated from college in 2009 with a philosophy degree and about $50,000 in student loans. Still trying to land a full-time job, he's working 20 hours a week, cold-calling sales prospects for a software company in a $10-an-hour job. "It is miserable," he said.
Many Minnesotans fall into the same grim ranks, working part time for lack of full-time work. Either their full-time hours were cut and have not been restored or they were laid off or are newly graduated and could only land part-time work.
The Minnesota annual average unemployment rate for 2010 was 7.3 percent. But including the "under-employed," the jobless rate almost doubles to 13.8 percent, according to data from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development.
Included in that broader measure are 163,300 Minnesotans who would take full-time jobs given the opportunity or would like to work more hours in their current jobs. Since last year, the size of that group has stayed stubbornly high, barely budging off a historical peak.
The number of part-timers who want to work full-time—more than 35 hours per week as the government measures it—is double what it was before the recession.
"It is chilling to see this kind of increase" while at the same time having so many people who are officially unemployed—around 190,000 in the state, said Kevin Ristau, a labor market analyst for Jobs Now Coalition, an advocacy group for low-income workers. The ratio of job seekers to full-time job openings in the state is 9.4 to 1, according to his analysis of job posting data.
Though the number of what are called involuntary part-timers has declined slightly since a year ago, it is still high.
"The last time we had conditions even remotely as bad as this was back in the 1980s, when the number of people in the labor force was much smaller," said Steve Hine, the state's director of labor market research. He has developed a model for tracking the broader measure of unemployment for the state on a monthly basis.
Moser knows how bad it is.
If his cold calls in search of software sales produce a lead, he hands it off to a salesperson. If the sale is closed, it's $50 for him. That hasn't happened yet.
"I thought it would be a lot easier," he said of the job hunt. At first he was looking for a writing job at a newspaper or magazine. Since that's been a futile search, he's broadened out. "I had no idea. It's harder than I was ever anticipating."
To be sure, businesses are restoring hours and the average workweek, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is gradually moving up, registering 34.4 hours per week in May. During the recession, hours worked took a dive as businesses rushed to cut costs by cutting the hours of their workers.
"When we saw hours being cut, cut, cut, cut, the number of involuntary part-timers was growing, growing, growing," said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC.
The number of involuntary part-timers nationwide hit 9 million for the first time in May 2009 and hovered around that mark over the course of last year.
It only started to come down in the past five months. Still, it remains high at 8.5 million, close to double the 4.4 million when the recession began at the end of 2007.
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