Economic Scene

Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes

By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: July 14, 2009
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In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so.

After Richard Smith, 58, was laid off from jobs at two carmakers, he moved to Charlotte, N.C., and found only part-time work. He makes $9.50 an hour repairing clubs at a Golf Galaxy store.

It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment. The national unemployment rate has risen to 9.5 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter-century. Yet it still excludes all those who have given up looking for a job and those part-time workers who want to be working full time.

Include them — as the Labor Department does when calculating its broadest measure of the job market — and the rate reached 23.5 percent in Oregon this spring, according to a New York Times analysis of state-by-state data. It was 21.5 percent in both Michigan and Rhode Island and 20.3 percent in California. In Tennessee, Nevada and several other states that have relied heavily on manufacturing or housing, the rate was just under 20 percent this spring and may have since surpassed it.

Almost nobody believes that unemployment has finished rising, either. On Tuesday, President Obama said he expected it to “tick up for several months.â€