How is it that employment in the retail sector increased by 253,000 jobs since last August, yet total aggregate hours worked has not budged an inch?
Let’s take a look.
Please consider the Investor’s Business Daily article Why You Should Discount Obama’s Retail Hiring Boom
Economists have been puzzled all year over how retail employment has surged despite the fact that Wal-Mart (WMT), Macy’s (M), Kohl’s (KSS) and other major players were closing stores and laying off thousands of workers.
The retail hiring boom has been happening even as customers have accelerated their shift to nonstore retailers like Amazon (AMZN). Meanwhile, Home Depot (HD), the leader in a category that has done relatively well in fending off online competition, stopped opening new stores in the U.S. more than a year ago
Nevertheless, retailers have added 323,300 workers over the past year — a spurt of growth that’s nearly the best since 2000.
Getting to the bottom of this mystery is important because the explanation suggests that the job market hasn’t been quite as strong as it appears, yet there may be less slack in the labor market due to Obama administration policies than dovish Federal Reserve policymakers suspect.
Early in June, Jefferies fixed-income economists Ward McCarthy and Thomas Simons noted the “incongruous” retail job gains of more than 50,000 per month during the first quarter, and they predicted some payback with a weak reading in May’s employment report. Yet even though the overall report was lousy, with a net 25,000 private-sector jobs added, retailers accounted for nearly half of those gains.
Given the sector fundamentals, it makes little sense that retailers would need to bolster their ranks in a big way. But upon closer examination, they really haven’t: While they may have more workers, they aren’t doing more work. Since August, the retail sector has added more than a quarter-million jobs, but aggregate hours worked haven’t budged. While seasonally adjusted retail employment has climbed 1.6%, those nearly 16 million workers are clocking 1.6% fewer hours, as the workweek has slumped from 31.5 hours to 31.0.
Supermarkets are a notable example: Over the two past years, employment is up by 70,000, or 2.9%, but the sector’s 2.5 million workers are working, in aggregate, 1.5% fewer hours per week.
Slacking Off
The number of U.S. workers clocking just above 30 hours has fallen to a record low relative to those with work hours just below ObamaCare’s new full-time threshold.
The Obamacare shift from defining full-time employment for health-care benefits from 32 hours to 30 hours is to blame.
As hours worked declines, reported employment rises. I have been harping about this for years.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Remember that full time job you used to have before ObamaCare?
Now its two or three part time jobs.
Exactly. It’s a great big jobs sharing program.
What’s needed now is a big pension sharing program so that all retirees can share in the fat public sector pensions, which is another thing Mish has been harping about for years.
SEIU has just the plan for you!
If you like your job, you can keep your jobs!
Purchasing power/level is what is important not fudged employment statistics. More jobs that pay less and consist of less and less hours is a portrait of the rigged/hypnotized delusion of wellness that idiot economists and TPTB want us to believe is a positive trend. Aggregate demand is decreasing and will never be/has never been adequate to attain an equilibrium. In order for high tech profit making economic systems to survive a continuing supplementary income and a reduction to retail prices is going to be increasingly necessary. Just drop your allegiance to general equilibrium theory and embrace Social Credit/Wisdomics/Gracenomics. It’s the only sane and humane way forward. Otherwise you’re just unconsciously enabling the agenda of socialism. Think through it, don’t resort to long held orthodoxies to the contrary and awaken to a new monetary and economic paradigm of Grace as in Gifting. It’s the way out and the way home to real hope instead of BS hope.
Nearby stores share workers. Twenty hours at one store and twenty hours at another. If you don’t like it you can vote Republican.
So we can cut taxes for the 1% and make them even better off than they were before?
Yes. Low taxes and deregulation make hiring people profitable.
Lowering taxes only works if you also lower spending. The “Reagan way” of making up for the not even lower taxes by increased borrowing, then having the Fed make up for that by taxation-of-an-ever-dwindling-productive-sector-through-the-backdoor-by-debasement, sure as heck don’t/didn’t/won’t/can’t work. Ever. No matter how “democratically elected” the nonsense is.
A combination of Ron Paul’s End the Fed and Federal Income Tax, replacing both with nothing at all whatsoever; and a hard, raised middle finger, default on all and any Federal debt and “obligations,” would work. But fat chance finding many half witted dittoheads in the GOP capable of figuring something that complimecated out. Instead of simply stomping their boots for whatever clown “their” party’s apparatchiks tell them is “tough on something” this time around.
Some stores that I’ve gone into during the past year had more employees than they needed, especially in PetSmart and HiHealth – a nutritional supplement shop. The employees seemed to have nothing to do but continuously offer me help I didn’t want.
I walked to the bank for a thousand dollars cash. The cash price is half the credit card price. Walking home I passed through Nordstroms wearing my usual exercise togs. As I stopped to finger the goods and and muse how I pay one third over the internet I felt the stark cold gaze of five clerks. Each was dressed in a suit. They looked hungry.
Ok so why not use “clothes” instead of togs? Are you British?
Ah but it has same root as toga. Yeah you must be in Europe.
Seems a bit pedantic but ok.
Mish. I hate to say this but you need to read more articles and educate yourself. Go to ZH and read the article at the top of the page if still posted about the jobs being worse than they are. Case in point sir. Over 500 million ghost jobs by this useless adm have been added by the bogus death birth business model in April and May alone. Not one mfg job in 20 years and not 1 F T job this year. Every job has been P T under 30 hours and low pay
You really do not understand the birth death model – I do
The aggregate remains the same. As other countries standard of living increase others must fall. China and the Far East rise, the west falls. A little each way but felt by many.
Because your Moronic Neighbors only see the 253k print and never look behind the curtain it’s a success story.
Numbers, numbers, numbers!!!!! Who cares these stats are being manipulated to make this sitting president and the president elects for the Dems look good and nothing more. We cannot have the numbers look bad in an election year period and it would not matter what party sits in the white house.
” As hours worked declines, reported employment rises. ”
And that is in part why these idiots have to increase the minimum wage.
People working fewer hours. While their costs are skyrocketing.
As cheap money lets Blackstone and others borrow at low cost
buy up real estate and jack up rents.
Yellens cheap money has directly caused a 60 % increase in rent
previously no large company would buy a SINGLE family residence
and rent it you needed at least a 3 family residence to cover costs.
.
.
Limiting total low wage working hours to below 30-35 a week was common back before ObanaCare. In fact it was standard practice in retail for at leaat 30 years. That’s why thw trigger was set where it is. As someone who spent a short time in retail management none of this surprises me. Most of those I managed back then had at least 1 additional part time job because we couldn’t give them more hours. As inefficient as it was we hired additional short timers to close the gaps in our schedule to avoid paying overtime and other “benefits”. This is why anything less than single payer health care as a right is never going to work.
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