The decline in work hours during the 2007-09 recession

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 134, Issue 4, 2011, Pages 53-59

  Kroll, Steven ^a  

^a BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS   (United States)

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EID: 79955973204     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Recessions are identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
2. For information, see " Information on Recessions and Recoveries, the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, and related topics" (Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, updated daily), http://www.nber.org/cycles/main.html (visited Dec. 13, 2010).
3. The data on employment, hours, and earnings used in this article are from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey, a monthly survey of about 140,000 nonfarm businesses and government agencies representing about 440,000 establishments
4. For more information on the survey's concepts and methodology, see BLS Handbook of Methods, chapter 2, " Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Establishment Survey" (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, no date), http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/pdf/homch2.pdf (visited Dec. 13, 2010).
5. To access CES data, see " Current Employment Statistics - CES (National)" (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, no date), http://www.bls.gov/ces (visited Dec. 13, 2010).
6. Data used in this article are seasonally adjusted unless otherwise noted
7. The Conference Board is a global, independent business membership and research association
8. To access the Board's coincident and leading index data, see " Global Business Cycle Indicators," http://www.conference-board.org/data/bcicountry.cfm?cid=1 (visited Apr. 11, 2011).
9. The Bureau of Labor Statistics produces data on hours and earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees in the private sector. The definition of " production and nonsupervisory employees" varies by industry. Employment, hours, and earnings estimates are for production employees in manufacturing and in mining and logging, construction workers in construction, and nonsupervisory employees in private service-providing industries. Production workers as a percentage of all workers have remained fairly constant, at about 80 percent over the years. Therefore, it is safe to assume that employment trends of production workers track overall employment trends in each industry supersector.
10. See chart 2
11. See also North American Industry Classification System: United States, 1997 (U.S. Census Bureau, 1997).
12. North American Industry Classification System, 2002 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2002), for a definition of " supersector."
13. Aggregate weekly hours for production workers are defined analogously to aggregate weekly hours for all employees. Aggregate weekly hours for production workers is the product of average weekly hours for production workers and number of production workers.
14. Material on the industry-level analysis of hours in this paragraph is taken largely from Julie Hatch Maxfield, " Jobs in 2005: How do they compare with their March 2001 counterparts," Monthly Labor Review, July 2006, pp. 15-26 (see especially pp. 17-18), http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/07/art2full.pdf.
15. For more information about employment in manufacturing, see Megan M. Barker, " Manufacturing employment hard hit during the 2007-09 recession," this issue, pp. 28-33.
16. The Bureau of Economic Analysis produces and publishes estimates of gross domestic product. Real gross domestic product has been increasing steadily since the third quarter of 2009.
17. For more information, see " National Income and Product Accounts Table" (Bureau of Economic Analysis, Mar. 25, 2011), http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=5&FirstYear=2009&LastYear=2010&Freq=Qtr.