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Thursday, September 3, 2015

Obamacare hasn't killed full-time jobs, either

When we last looked at Obamacare as an alleged "job-killer," Matt Yglesias had just pointed out that 2014, the first full year of insurance on the exchanges, was also the best year for job creation since 1999. But recently a non-blogging friend reminded me of a related anti-Obamacare meme, the idea that employers have been cutting their workers below 32 hours per week so they would not have to provide them with health insurance. His argument was, logically enough, that this would mean a loss of full-time jobs.

As with so many other anecdotal Obamacare horror stories, this one does not stand up to even simple inspection. Just like total job creation, it turns out that full-time (BLS uses 35 hours/week, not 32, by the way) job creation has quickly increased since December 2013, just before exchange insurance went into effect. Not only that, part-time employment has fallen slightly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly "Employment Situation" (Table A-9 in both cases) tells the tale.

Date            Full or Part Time     Not Seasonally Adjusted Jobs          Seasonally Adjusted Jobs

December 2013   Full-time          116,661,000                                      117,278,000
July 2015             Full-time         123,142,000                                     121,589,000
Change                                      + 6,481,000                                      + 4,311,000

December 2013   Part-time           27,762,000                                        27,372,000
July 2015             Part-time          26,850,000                                        27,265,000
Change                                          - 912,000                                          - 107,000

I included both seasonally adjusted and not seasonally adjusted data for completeness sake, but when we are comparing a summer month to a winter month, surely the seasonally adjusted figures are the correct ones to use. For those of you keeping score at home, then, full-time jobs have increased by 4.3 million since Obamacare exchange insurance went into effect, whereas part-time jobs have fallen by 107,000. Neither of these fits the anecdotes of workers being shunted from full-time to part-time work to avoid providing insurance. This increase in full-time work has been accomplished in the span of just 19 months, or an average of over 226,000 new full-time jobs per month.

Of course, it's theoretically possible that using sophisticated statistical controls might uncover a hidden negative relationship; that we'd have even more full-time jobs than we do if the exchanges hadn't gone into effect. Even if that were true, it's obvious that everything else going on in the Obama economy is having a much bigger effect on full-time employment, so there's no justification for using the epithet "job-killing" on the off chance that it's true.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.