The jobs chart that really has us worried

A trend to watch in the months ahead

Involuntary part-time work — defined as the share of employed workers with part-time jobs who would rather be working full-time — is surging in a way that is typical during a recession:

To be more precise, between September and November of this year, the share of the employed working part-time for economic reasons¹ increased by about 20 percent.² Historically, moves of this size tend to show up when labor markets are cooling rapidly. In the figure above, the recent increase pushes the current path into the upper tail of historical variation and closer to the range typically observed around past recessions.

To be clear, recessions tend to be characterized by a sustained increase in involuntary part-time employment over a stretch of time. Simply crossing the 80th percentile threshold alone does not make a recession.³

The takeaway of the trend is therefore not that we are definitively in recession, but rather that we’ve entered a dangerous spot and we should keep a close eye on the months ahead.

Appendix — Chart Methodology

What exactly is the figure showing? In the language of economists, it places the last few months’ movement in the share of involuntary part-time work in historical context using an event-study-“ish” approach.

Each month is treated as a base month (month 0), and the chart tracks how the involuntary part-time share changes from 12 months before to 12 months after that base month.

The thin grey lines show trajectories that begin at the onset of past recessions.⁴ The shaded bands summarize the distribution of all historical month-to-month paths at each relative month, with the middle band capturing the 20th–80th percentile and the outer bands capturing the 5th–20th and 80th–95th percentiles. The highlighted line uses April 2025 (“Liberation Day”) as the base month for comparison.

1. The BLS defines involuntary part-time work, or part-time for economic reasons, as employed people who worked 1 to 34 hours in the reference week because of slack work, unfavorable business conditions, seasonal declines in demand, or because they could not find full-time work. Among those who usually work part time, it counts only people who want and are available for full-time work.

2. In September 2025, the share of employed workers who were working part time for economic reasons was 2.798 percent, calculated as (Employment Level: Part-Time for Economic Reasons) / (Total Employment). In levels, this corresponds to 4,579,000 people working part time for economic reasons out of 163,645,000 total employed. In November 2025, the share of employed workers who were working part time for economic reasons was 3.352 percent, calculated as (Employment Level: Part-Time for Economic Reasons) / (Total Employment). In levels, this corresponds to 5,488,000 people working part time for economic reasons out of 163,741,000 total employed. All numbers are seasonally adjusted.

3. I would add one additional caveat. From September to November’s numbers, an additional 909,000 people were added to the count of involuntary part-time. One possible contributor to the rise in this figure is the impact of the federal shutdown and the furloughed federal workers. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, at least 670,000 federal employees were furloughed, and the shutdown was still active during the household survey period (as noted by Guy Berger, who expects a return to normal in the next report). Though it’s worth noting that even if literally every single one of those furloughed employees became a part-time worker — a preposterously high assumption — the share of part-time workers would still have climbed by 5 percent. A more realistic hypothetical assumption — say, half of them became part-time workers — still results in a 12.5 percent increase in the involuntary part-time share.

4. Only the first month of each NBER recession is shown for readability and COVID months are excluded so the 2020 spike does not dominate the scale.