Is Part-Time Employment America's New Normal?
Is Part-Time Employment America's New Normal? Rethinking Obama's Popularity--And The 2012 Election (Part 1)
June 8, 201311:49 AM MST
Many pundits are linking President Obama's sinking poll numbers to the recent rash of scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, and Benghazi.
Such poll numbers can only sink further when the public discovers that the NSA was sharing its information on Americans with a foreign intelligence organization, Britain's NSA equivalent, the GCHQ.
Public attention to these scandals has been heightened by various Congressional investigations of the administration's use of various government agencies to audit, spy on, and generally harass a range of political opponents, members of the media, and in the case of the NSA and PRISM scandals, the entire American public.
Such public scrutiny is definitely hurting the President's public image. According to pollsters, among 57% of those following the IRS, Benghazi, and AP scandals, President Obama's disapproval rating is as high as 57%.
In all of these discussion of the impact of the scandals on Obama's public image, the media is ignoring one basic fact. The President's approval ratings were already beginning to trend lower as far back as February of this year, even before these scandals caught the attention of the public. throughout much of 2013 Reuters, McClatchy-Marist, CNN and Wall Street Journal surveys have measured his standing with the American public at around 46% or 47%.
Many critics have linked President Obama's failed attempts to muster the Senate votes necessary to pass his gun control legislation and his inability to stop budget cuts, the "Sequestration" measure, to those weak early-2013 poll numbers. His push for immigration reform, although backed by a bipartisan "Gang of Eight" in the Senate, faces stiff political headwinds.
The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan senses that Americans are suffering from "Obama Fatigue" only six months into the President's second term. Democrats fret that Obama's declining "power to persuade" even members of his own party to follow his legislative lead is turning him into a lame duck leader.
Actually, the President's mediocre poll numbers over the last few months are very much where they have been for most of his time in office, going back to at least the summer of 2009.
In fact, the only time over the last few years that Obama enjoyed relatively high approval ratings,
in the 52%-54% range, were in the days immediately preceding the November 2012 election and for a month or two thereafter.
The real riddle is this: What factors or events in late-October 2012 caused Barack Obama's approval ratings to suddenly ascend to the uncharacteristically high levels that helped get him re- elected to a 2nd term?
It is unlikely Obama's economic record--historically high unemployment rates, shrinking incomes, and rising food and energy prices--caused that temporary leap in the polls in late- October. Similar economic conditions turned Presidents Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Ford into one-termers. Throughout his campaign Obama largely avoided discussing his foreign policy record, plagued as it was by his handling of the Benghazi assault and the "Arab Spring."
In my next column I will examine the factors that led to to Obama's election to a second term as President in 2012.
August 7, 20139:29 AM MST
The July 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report contained little data to spur optimism about Americans' economic prospects. Only 162,000 jobs were created, the June job numbers were revised down by 26,000 jobs, and most of the jobs created were in low-paying fields such as retail and food services.
The most disturbing number, however, is the ratio of new full-time to part-time jobs. Since March of this year, part-time jobs have increased by 791,000, full-time a paltry 187,000.
The meager number of new full-time jobs created is hardly good news for the nearly 2 million freshly-minted college graduates. Members of the Class of 2013 expect to start their careers this summer and fall, but the cold reality is that the full-time professional jobs most graduates hope to land are becoming harder to find every year. In fact, the number of such jobs is shrinking. Last month payrolls for those with at least a four-year college degree fell by 256,000.
According to a report by the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, “For the fifth consecutive year, new graduates will enter a profoundly weak labor market and will face
high unemployment and underemployment rates and depressed wages.” EPI reports that 18.3 percent of recent graduates were underemployed, compared to 9.9 percent in 2007.
Most alarming is the long term trend in full-time job creation. Since January 2009 in the United States a grand total of only 270,000 full-time jobs have been added to the economy. At the same time, we added 1.9 million part-time jobs, according to a report by the House Ways and Means Committee.
Economists, politicians and pundits are pinning at least part of the blame for this fundamental transformation of the job market from part-time to full-time employment on the Affordable Care Act, popularly referred to as "Obamacare." This 1500-plus page law's employer health-insurance mandate applies only to full-time workers, which the law define's as an employee working 30 or more hours per week. Not surprisingly, employment lawyers have been counseling companies to transform many full-time jobs into part-time positions to avoid being caught in the Obamacare regulatory web.
Obamacare's perceived negative impact on jobs and the economy is hurting the President's standing with the American public. Rasmussen reports that only 45% of American approve of President Obama, 54% disapprove. Reuters and Monmouth polls find the President's approval rating in danger of slipping below 40%.
While we might debate the reasons behind the shrinking full-time job market, there is little doubt that part-time employment is rapidly becoming the "new normal" for American job-seekers.
According toKeith Hall, a senior researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, over the past six months the household survey shows 963,000 more people employed, but practically all of them, 936,000, reportedly in part-time jobs. According to Hall, "That is a really high number for a six-month period.. I'm not sure that has ever happened over six months before."
These household survey employment figures translate into almost 35 part-time jobs created for every new full-time job!
It is doubtful that Americans expect or desire such a bleak future for themselves and their children. We can only hope that new leaders emerge with the vision to get the US back on the road to a true economic recovery.
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