Skyrocketing Numbers of Federal Workers on Forced Leave

The latest jobs report showed that federal workers didn’t lose jobs in July, leading to some suggestions that the sequester hasn’t affected government employment. But the overall federal government jobs total doesn’t capture furloughs â€" that is, forced unpaid leave â€" because people who are being furloughed for say, one day a week, are technically still counted as being employed.

The picture looks very different if you examine the number of federal workers who say they are reluctantly working part time because they cannot get full-time hours.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey

The number of these “involuntary part-timers” jumped in July, to 199,000. That is nearly four times the number of involuntary part-timers in the federal government in 2012 and in 2011. (The numbers are not seasonally adjusted, so it’s best to use year-over-year comparisons.)

In fact, as I explained in July, in every month since February, the number of reluctant federal part-timers has been higher than its level in 2012. In each of those months in 2013, the level has also been higher than in 2011, with the exception of April, when there were an equal number of federal part-timers for economic reasons in 2011 and 2013 (64,000).

And of course, these figures show only what’s happening with federal workers. There are many private-sector workers whose jobs and hours depend on federal money, too, as I wrote in an article in June.