Re: Working hours (Was: Why is America so violent)
On May 13, 2007, at 10:45 PM, Marvin Gandall wrote:
Do the BLS stats reflect household or payroll data?
If the latter, wouldn’t the agency then have two data sets for the
same individual - showing in one case an average five day work week of
30 hours drawn on his/her Walmart time card and an average work week of 20
hours from his/her bar job?
The hours data comes (or, if I were the Fed, come) from the payroll
survey. Their focus is the job, not the worker, so there’s no way to
link the payroll data to the household side. And confidentiality
requirements would probably make it impossible to link individual
datapoints that way anyway.
The household survey does collect data on multiple jobholdings. About
6% of the labor force had more than one job in the mid-90s (the
current data series begins in 1994); it’s now about 5%.
Doug