I’ve been struggling to make ends meet lately, there was a period of about six weeks last spring where my hours at work were seriously cut and my paycheck shrank considerably. During this time I started looking for part time jobs to supplement my income.
I remembered how job postings were everywhere around the time I took my current job in spring of 2022. You would drive down the street and seemingly every other store had a large Now Hiring sign out front, haven’t been noticing that much these last few months. But still, I thought it would be easy to find secondary employment.
One evening I applied for about 10 jobs on the Indeed app, each low wage weekend shifts in the hospitality and janitorial fields. And with each one there was a message above the Submit Resume button that informed me that this particular job had many applicants and my resume might not be considered.
I was a bit surprised by this, were these kinds of jobs really that in demand? Is the job market starting to become oversaturated? A year ago the number of people choosing to work part time jobs was at 22 million, roughly 14% of the total work force. While the number of people working part time for economic reasons, 3.7 million, was declining.
At that time the ratio of people voluntarily seeking part time work versus those who wanted more hours was 6:1, a good sign for the economy. But I did some Googling to find out what the rate of people working multiple jobs was today and I was a bit surprised.
This is the highest rate of “overemployment” since the start of the pandemic and it’s only trending upward. Inflation is slowing but it’s still outpacing wage growth and is causing people to have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. I found an article with some scary looking graphs here, this one in particular stood out to me.
All this raises questions about the job market as a whole. Namely, how many of these newly created jobs I hear about are taken by people who’re already employed somewhere else? How many of them are only part time positions? How many of them are going to immigrants exclusively? Are the numbers boosted by seasonal work? I found this post from ZeroHedge on Twitter and it only raised more questions for me.
I take everything I see on the bird site with a grain of salt, but I did happen upon this chart directly from the BLS showing job gains and losses from May of this year.
Now to keep things in perspective, last April it was reported that part time jobs dipped by 914K while full time grew by 949K.
BUT if we look at the 12 month change we see part time work creeping up past full time employment this year.
Overall people are hustling, and not in the cool Alpha Male crypto scam kinda way but more in the “Oh fuck how am I gonna pay for food and my medication?!” kinda way. Maybe month to month charts aren’t the best indictors for these kinds of trends but the vibes this whole thing is giving me are very…off.
I keep my ear to the ground and try to pay as much attention to the way people talk around me. A few of my coworkers have taken on part time work for extra money, a few more with families have both spouses working are struggling mightily. Me and my sister are both still looking for additional work and if the warnings on the Indeed listings are any indiction, we’re far from the only ones.