Multiple Jobholders Hit New All Time High As Part-Time Jobs Soar

While today’s headline jobs number was essentially Goldilocks, with the payrolls print missing the expected print of 180K by just 2,000 jobs, it was accompanied by a plunge in the unemployment rate to 9 year lows as a result of a jump in the number of people leaving the labor force, and rising to a new all time high of over 95 million. But while the quantitative headline aspect is open to interpretation, the qualitative component of the November jobs print was – just like in the case of October – quite clear: it was ugly, again.
Recall that in October, the Household Survey revealed that the number of full-time workers tumbled by 103,000 as part-time workers jumped by 90,000. The trend continued in November, when another 118,000 part-time jobs were added, paired with a far more modest 9,000 increase in full -time jobs.
The divergence is even uglier when looking at the non-seasonally adjusted jobs, i.e., real change: here we see a drop of 628,000 full-time jobs in November, offset by a surge in 678,000 part-time, mostly retail jobs.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Dec 2, 2016.