Monday, July 1, 2019

Working multiple jobs is suddenly a problem

By Donald Sensing

Here we go again. Naturally, the progressive originally posting this never explains why this is a problem:


According to the BLS, the rate of persons working more than one job from 1995-2000 was more than 6 percent, but I can't recall what party was in the White House then. Had to have been a Republican, though!


Then, 
... the multiple jobholding rate began to recede. By the mid-2000s, the rate had declined to 5.2 percent and remained close to that level from 2006 to 2009. In 2010, the multiple jobholding rate decreased to 4.9 percent and has remained at 4.9 percent or 5.0 percent from 2010 to 2017. (Link).
For 2018, the rate is reported by the BLS as 5 percent. 

Again - why, exactly, is this bad? To that question, only the sound of crickets chirping.

The WSJ wrote about this a year ago: "Does everyone have two jobs?"

Do Americans have too many jobs? Democratic Socialist congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said last week that “unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs” and “people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said people are “working minimum wage jobs that won’t support them or they’re working two, three or four jobs.” But Bureau of Labor Statistics data show only a small minority of Americans work multiple jobs. That percentage has been around 5% of working Americans since 2010, though it was higher before then. ...  Are people working “60, 70, 80 hours a week”? Rarely. But for a brief dip during the recession, private-sector employees have worked an average of 34.2 to 34.6 hours a week since BLS began tracking the data in 2006. The average stood at 34.5 hours in June. BLS considers 35 hours a week “full time,” so working 70 or 80 hours would be equivalent to two full-time jobs. Only 360,000 people worked two full time jobs in June—0.2% of the workforce. There may well be people working 60 hours a week or more on one job—but if that were common, the overall average for hours worked would be well above 34.5.
I can only conclude that in this, as in countless other areas, for Americans to work more than one job at a time when a Democrat is president is morally-commendable industriousness but when a Republican is president is the result of an oppressive, immoral and economically-punitive administration.

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