Voluntary part-time workers are people who work part time by their own preference, because they want or need a part-time schedule given other interests or obligations. Involuntary part-time workers are people who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule, because their employer doesn’t give them enough hours or because they can only find a part-time job.

Economic Snapshot

The figure shows trends in full-time, voluntary part-time, and involuntary part-time work in the recession and recovery (specifically, it shows the growth rate in each type of job since December 2007, the official start of the Great Recession). Both full-time and voluntary part-time work—which both represent jobs people want— fell dramatically through early 2010 and have made slow but steady improvement since then.  Involuntary part-time work—which by definition is something people don’t want—follows the opposite trend.  The trend in involuntary part-time work is more dramatic than the trends in full-time and voluntary part-time work, but they all follow the broad contours of the recession and recovery, i.e. they all deteriorated in the recession and its immediate aftermath and have made slow but steady improvement since then. Full-time and voluntary part-time employment are now generally rising, while involuntary part-time work is now generally falling. The net effect of these two opposing trends in part-time employment is that total part-time employment, after rising in the recession, has been roughly flat in the recovery.

In 2012, the last year with data, public investment for nondefense purposes was falling precipitously relative to potential gross domestic product (GDP)—the maximum sustainable output of the economy. Within the next decade, nondefense public investment will be lower than its previous historic low point. The figure below shows that by 2023 nondefense investment will be less than two-thirds of its average share of GDP from 1962 to 2012. (Because only the small amount of defense investment that goes to basic and applied research typically contributes to private-sector output, the graph below depicts only nondefense investment, though the downward trend applies to defense investment as well.)

In addition to improving the country’s infrastructure, increasing investment in a struggling economy has recently shown positive effects: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created jobs for up to 3.3 million people in 2010, when ARRA spending peaked. Of all of ARRA’s components, the Congressional Budget Office found that the two with the biggest bang-to-buck ratio were federal purchases of goods and services and transfer payments to the states for infrastructure spending—when the states actually spent the money as intended.

MORE: OWS is right about skewed economic rewards in the U.S.

The highest-income 1 percent of households captured nearly 60 percent of all income gains between 1979 and 2007, a period covering the last three business cycles up through the last year before the Great Recession. In contrast, the bottom 90 percent of households on the income scale captured less than 9 percent of all income gains over this period. And the bottom 90 percent claimed just one-quarter of what the top 0.1 percent (one one-thousandth) of households gained (36 percent) over 1979-2007.

In short, the claim that income gains have become very concentrated in recent decades is clearly supported by facts. What will happen in the current business cycle is unknown: While top incomes typically fall more during recession years (as stock market declines disproportionately affect those with the highest incomes), they also typically rebound much more quickly.

Source: Economic Policy Institute analysis of “Table A6: Top fractiles income levels (including capital gains) in the United States” in the Excel files (July 2010) which update Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 2003, pp. 1-39. These data include all sources of market-based incomes such as wages and salaries and dividend and interest income and realized capital gains, but do not include government transfer income.

In 1993, before NAFTA, the U.S. had a small, job-supporting trade surplus with Mexico. By 2010, the U.S. had a trade deficit with Mexico that displaced 682,900 jobs, with jobs lost or displaced in every state, as shown on the map. Exports to Mexico supported nearly 800,000 U.S. jobs in 2010, but imports displaced 1.5 million jobs for a net loss of nearly 700,000 jobs. Jobs displaced by growing imports from Mexico far exceeded any jobs gained through increased exports.

Jobs are a key issue in the current debate. Proponents of the three FTAs on the table have claimed that they will create tens or hundreds of thousands of U.S. export jobs. Counting export jobs while ignoring imports is like trying to run a business while ignoring expenses—it’s a sure-fire recipe for bankruptcy. EPI has estimated that 214,000 net U.S. jobs will be lost or displaced (counting both export jobs gained and import jobs displaced) in the first seven years under the proposed FTAs with South Korea and Colombia. It’s important to consider both sides of the ledger when evaluating proposed FTAs.

The Providence and Hartford Hispanic unemployment rates are more than ten percentage-points higher than the 13.4 percent rate for Hispanics in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which has the largest Hispanic population.

The metropolitan areas with the highest rates of Hispanic unemployment had much higher unemployment rates than the overall national unemployment rate of 9.6 percent in 2010. They were also much higher than the national Hispanic average of 12.5 percent. Indeed, the Hispanic metro areas with the highest rates rival the peak national unemployment rate during the Great Depression. Hispanic workers, like all other workers, need our policymakers to enact a bold jobs agenda.

Click figure to enlarge

MORE: See Hispanic unemployment highest in Northeast metropolitan areas for more Hispanic unemployment rates by metro area. See High black unemployment widespread across nation’s metropolitan areas for black metro unemployment rates.

MORE: Download Excel spreadsheet of white-collar unemployment data from 1973-2011

Research assistance provided by Nicholas Finio

It is also sobering to examine the racial difference in wealth trends. Wealth for the median black household has nearly disappeared, falling from $6,300 in 1983 to $2,200 in 2009 – a decrease of more than 65 percent. This means half of black households have less than $2,200 in wealth. Among white households, median wealth has fallen substantially since 2007, but at $97,900, remains higher than the 1983 level of $94,100. White median wealth is now 44.5 times higher than black median wealth.

Racial disparities in income and unemployment have been exacerbated by the Great Recession, and the persistent high unemployment ahead of us will do more damage unless we create more jobs now.

The disparity of changes in wealth over the last generation is portrayed in the figure, which shows the shares of the wealth gains for various wealth classes. All of the gains in wealth accrued to the upper fifth, with 40.2 percent of the gains going to the upper 1 percent and 41.5 percent going to the next wealthiest 4 percent of households. This translated to gains of $4.5 million per household in the richest 1 percent and a gain of roughly $1.2 million per household in the next richest 4 percent of households.

In other words, the richest 5 percent of households obtained roughly 82 percent of all the nation’s gains in wealth between 1983 and 2009. The bottom 60 percent of households actually had less wealth in 2009 than in 1983, meaning they did not participate at all in the growth of wealth over this period.

As college students head back to the classroom this semester, a harsh reality confronts them — the rewards for the time, energy, and money that young people put into college are less than they were a decade ago.  Since 2000, America’s young college graduates have seen wages, adjusted for inflation, deteriorate.  This lack of wage growth may be particularly surprising to those used to reading about the vast unfilled need for college graduates, which if true would lead to increases in their earnings.  The chart below tracks the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage for young college graduates with no advanced degree from 1979 to 2010. 

After gains in the 1980s and particularly in the 1990s, hourly wages for young college-educated men in 2000 were $22.75, but that dropped by almost a full dollar to $21.77 by 2010.  For young college-educated women, hourly wages fell from $19.38 to $18.43 over the same period.  Now, with unemployment expected to remain above 8% well into 2014, it will likely be many years before young college graduates — or any workers — see substantial wage growth.