As we’ve reported time and time again, once one looks past the headlines extolling the labor market “recovery” in the US, the details of these reports paint a much more discouraging picture. One need only look to the establishment survey – one of two measures used to calculate the Labor Department’s monthly jobs figures – which shows that full-time jobs with benefits are increasingly being supplanted by low-paying part-time jobs. In the employment data, many of these jobs are misleadingly double- and triple-counted as the data fail to reflect that many workers are being forced to work two or three part-time jobs, instead of one full-time job.
Unsurprisingly, a recent report from Stratfor reveals that many European countries are struggling with the same problem – except the situation is even more dire. As Stratfor explains, jobs offered under part-time and temporary contracts are accounting for an increasingly large share of total employment, while full-time jobs are disappearing at an alarming clip.
In 2003, well before Europe’s economic crisis, 15 percent of workers in the European Union were employed under part-time contracts. By 2015, that had risen to 19 percent. Meanwhile, in the US, about 18% of workers are part-time, according to the most recent data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jul 5, 2017.
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