• 287 days Will The ECB Continue To Hike Rates?
  • 287 days Forbes: Aramco Remains Largest Company In The Middle East
  • 289 days Caltech Scientists Succesfully Beam Back Solar Power From Space
  • 689 days Could Crypto Overtake Traditional Investment?
  • 694 days Americans Still Quitting Jobs At Record Pace
  • 696 days FinTech Startups Tapping VC Money for ‘Immigrant Banking’
  • 699 days Is The Dollar Too Strong?
  • 699 days Big Tech Disappoints Investors on Earnings Calls
  • 700 days Fear And Celebration On Twitter as Musk Takes The Reins
  • 702 days China Is Quietly Trying To Distance Itself From Russia
  • 702 days Tech and Internet Giants’ Earnings In Focus After Netflix’s Stinker
  • 706 days Crypto Investors Won Big In 2021
  • 706 days The ‘Metaverse’ Economy Could be Worth $13 Trillion By 2030
  • 707 days Food Prices Are Skyrocketing As Putin’s War Persists
  • 709 days Pentagon Resignations Illustrate Our ‘Commercial’ Defense Dilemma
  • 710 days US Banks Shrug off Nearly $15 Billion In Russian Write-Offs
  • 713 days Cannabis Stocks in Holding Pattern Despite Positive Momentum
  • 714 days Is Musk A Bastion Of Free Speech Or Will His Absolutist Stance Backfire?
  • 714 days Two ETFs That Could Hedge Against Extreme Market Volatility
  • 716 days Are NFTs About To Take Over Gaming?
  1. Home
  2. Markets
  3. Other

Revealing Look at Hours Worked and The Number of Employees Working Those Hours

Inquiring minds may be interested in a set of charts that show trends in hours worked. The charts are as of the latest job numbers from Friday, October 3, 2014.

Index of Aggregate Hours All Private Employees

Index of Aggregate Hours All Private Employees

The index of aggregate weekly hours of all employees is at a new all-time high. The data only goes back to 2007 so let's also take a look at hours worked by production and monsupervisory employees.

Index of Aggregate Hours Production and Nonsupervisory Employees

Index of Aggregate Hours Production and Nonsupervisory Employees

The indexes are formulated by multiplication of the number of employees by the average number of hours worked. So let's take a look at both sub-components.

Average Weekly Hours of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees

Average Weekly Hours of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees

Number of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees

Number of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees

More people working but for how many hours?

Employed, Usually Work Full Time

Employed, Usually Work Full Time

In November of 2007, there were 121,875,000 full time employees. Now there are 119,287,000.

Fulltime employment is 2,588,000 below the 2007 peak. Meanwhile working age population, 16 and older has gone up from 232,939,000 to 248,446,000. That's an increase of 15,507,000.

Simply put, the working-age population has gone up by approximately 15.5 million while fulltime employment has declined by 2.5 million.

Some of this is related to boomer demographics and retirement. A lot of it isn't.

It takes a detailed look at the number of people in each age group and how those age groups have shifted over time to normalize the data. Tim Wallace and I explored this idea this once before, for the time period 2010-2013.

For details, see Fed Study Shows Drop in Participation Rate Explained by Retirement; Let's Explore that Idea, in Depth and in Pictures.

It's been nearly as year since that post, and with the job data seemingly booming, it's time for an update. I hope to have new graphs later this week or next, for the entire 2007-2014 period.

 

Back to homepage

Leave a comment

Leave a comment