Right now, the United States is celebrating because the unemployment rate has dipped below six percent. President Obama has touted that the overall economy is improving and many Americans are now better off than they were when he first entered the White House in 2009.
However, when one looks behind those numbers, there is a terrible tale: a record-low labor force participation rate and a high rate of workers stuck in part-time jobs. It turns out that much of the jobs that are created each month are low-paying, part-time and oftentimes in the service sector.
In the supposed economic recovery, these millions of workers are unable to land full-time employment opportunities that can offer greater stability, higher salaries and an increased sense of purpose. It’s bad news all around for this sector of the labor market.
According to a statistic published in CNN Money, “The number of people working part-time involuntarily is more than 50 percent higher than when the recession began.” Although there was a boost in part-time jobs prior to the economic collapse, that did drop quite sharply soon after.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests that the number of involuntary part-time workers this year stands at 7.5 million, compared to eight million last year. It should be noted, however, that there are a large sum of part-time workers who experience long bouts of joblessness, which prompts them to hop from job to job.
On top of that, part-time employee do not receive benefits, vacation days, sick leave and so on.
What can we exactly blame then? Well, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), one that we now know was based on unscrupulous means and deception thanks to Jonathan Gruber. Obamacare mandates employers to offer health insurance for their workforce when they work 30 or more hours each week.
The response by companies has been to slash the amount of hours their employees work so they are not then required to provide health insurance. This was the unintended consequence of the healthcare reform law, something that wasn’t read by Congress. Therefore, because of the president’s lack of economic understanding, millions of workers are forced to work either fewer than 29 hours a week or work multiple part-time jobs to pay the rent.
Indeed, the ubiquity of part-time work, which isn’t factored into the unemployment rate, is a signal that the economic recovery isn’t really a recovery at all. The recovery is something that benefits only Wall Street and Washington because of cheap money, low interest rates and massive easing. For the rest of America, it’s misery.
It’s too bad that the Republicans won’t simply repeal Obamacare if they win the White House in 2016. If they do, they’ll just replace it with their own government mandate.
Things will soon get a lot worse with millions of new job permits for immigrants and the 2.5 million jobs that will be affected when the delayed $130 billion in business penalties take effect under Obamacare.