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Title: Work-hour volatility by the numbers: How do workers fare in the wake of the pandemic?
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2023
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Abstract: Economic lives have become fluid in the United States during recent decades, with individual or family incomes often varying from month to month, from quarter to quarter, or across years. The income instability that hourly workers and their families are facing is mostly driven by frequent earnings changes, which could be a result of unpredictable work hours or involuntary job churn. This, along with insufficient work hours (another understudied workplace issue), may jointly affect low-income workers’ economic security. The current economic recovery, with strong job growth and high rates of jobs switches, provides a unique opportunity to examine work-hour insecurity issues and better understand the extent to which the volatility of work hours has leveled off in the past two years and who does or does not benefit from the ongoing economic recovery. Using a nationally representative sample of workers, this brief provides a portrait of intra-year work-hour volatility (or instability) and patterns over time, from 2016 to 2022, by wage level, parental status, race and ethnicity, educational attainment, and age. It then explores whether specific demographic groups exhibit higher variability in working hours in the phase of economic recovery, net of other workers’ characteristics. For comparison, I also examine levels of work hours across groups. Results reveal that greater volatility is marked among workers from the bottom wage quintile, the less educated, and the young. Unmarried parents and workers of color experience relatively high volatility in hours. Despite regaining hours as the economy reopened, these groups consistently worked fewer hours over the period examined. Prior to the pandemic, the gaps in volatility across groups narrowed; although COVID-19 erased some of this progress, the decline in the level of volatility workers faced in 2022 suggests a return to pre-pandemic conditions. The extent to which those gains will be sustained remains to be seen as economic recovery progresses.
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Authors: Cai, Julie
Publisher: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Work, Family, and Time
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