RECENT TRENDS IN PART-TIME EMPLOYMENT

I. INTRODUCTION Contemporary accounts paint a bleak picture of the recent labor market. The diminishing importance of the manufacturing sector and widespread corporate restructuring in virtually all industries have contributed to a sense of gloom about the prospects for many workers. The concern over the loss of high-wage jobs is well-founded: a well-documented deterioration in wages has occurred for those with a high school education since the late 1970s (Murphy and Welch, 1992; Juhn et al., 1991; Bound and Johnson, 1992). Both academic and media portrayals of part-time employment resonate the impression that a steady, upward trend in the rate of part-time employment has been anything but transitory. For example, Tilly (1991) discusses reasons for the continuing growth of part-time employment between 1973 and 1989. Bollier (1994) claims that "many employers are shifting more work to part-timers in order to avoid paying benefits." Johnson (1994) argues that "[higher-paying union] jobs are scarce, as many of the big [trucking] companies are turning to part-timers, rather than hiring full-time workers." And Silverstein (1994) points out that "[i]n an era of heightened job insecurity, the image of ... a fall from a well-paying, full-time position to a marginal part-time job haunts many workers." It is true that part-time employment has grown over the past two to three decades. However, this study shows that the same cannot be said for the most recent decade. Since the mid-1970s, voluntary part-time employment has been steady or has declined for both men and women, while involuntary part-time employment has continued to move counter-cyclically. After controlling for cyclical movements, the analysis shows that involuntary part-time employment has not increased for either men or women since 1984. In contrast, the share of temporary services in employment more than tripled during the 1980s. This evidence suggests that many people may not understand the distinction between part-time and temporary jobs. II. PART-TIME EMPLOYMENT 1964-1993 The Current Population Survey (CPS) defines a part-time worker as someone who worked less than 35 hours during the survey week at all jobs and who (i) usually works part-time or (ii) usually works full-time, yet was part-time during the survey week for one of the following reasons: slack work, material shortage, plant or machine repair, new job started during the survey week, job terminated during the survey week, or could not find a full-time job. People who worked part-time for the second category of reasons are classified as involuntary part-time. The category of involuntary part-time also includes those who usually work part-time and give reasons in the second category for being part-time. The CPS classifies all other part-timers as voluntary. This study uses a number of alternative definitions of part-time to address problems with the CPS definition. One problem with the traditional CPS definition of part-time employment is that a cyclical increase in the number of full-time workers who were temporarily working part-time would register as an increase in part-time jobs, even though no change had occurred in the number of people who usually work part-time (which is a better indicator of long-run employment trends). This led the Bureau of Labor Statistics, starting in 1986, to drop these workers from the calculations of the number of part-time workers (Nardone, 1986). For historical comparability, the analysis here uses, as a benchmark, the definition that includes those who usually work full-time. This first measure is called CPS definition # 1. CPS definition # 2, in contrast, conforms to the current measure used by the BLS. It excludes the full-timers who are part-time during the survey week and includes only those who usually work less than 35 hours at all jobs during the survey week. A second potential problem with the traditional CPS definition is that workers who hold two part-time jobs are counted as full-time workers because the CPS groups hours worked at all jobs together when defining part-time employment. …