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© Copyright 1997 by the Wyoming Department of Employment, Research & Planning

The lead article describes the linkage between earnings opportunities and the strategies workers and families in the north central region of the United States use to obtain them. Multiple jobholding can be viewed as a strategy employed by the sellers of labor in markets where holding more than one job is possible, accepted and a viable means of increasing earnings.

Excluding Hawaii (and for purposes of discussion, including Kansas and Missouri), the contiguous north central plains and mountain states share a common history of post Civil War expansion, and in large part rely on extractive (including agriculture) resource-based economies. The post-Civil War era of expansion, under the doctrine of manifest destiny, was developed as a result of a federal policy of subsidized transportation, agricultural and mining development, and protection from foreign trade and competition. The labor markets, educational institutions and form of family living, and earnings opportunities of these contiguous states appear to represent something more than mere coincidence.

This central role of place--locality--in labor market performance also has consequences for the way in which we interpret data collected from the monthly establishment survey. The Current Employment Statistics (CES) monthly survey of establishments is frequently treated as an economic indicator--a measure of total or aggregate demand in the labor market for labor.

However, the incidence of multiple jobholding means that the same individual is counted more than once in the same month. And as we have now seen, multiple jobholding as a regional phenomenon means that the establishment survey does not bear the same relationship to "aggregate demand" in the north central region of the U.S. as it does elsewhere. Multiple jobholding is an intervening variable between aggregate demand and the measurement of employment. This intervening variable represents the market strategies of employers and job seekers that impair the comparability of employment estimates between this region of the country and other regions of the U.S., and the comparability of state estimates to national estimates.

We know from prior research (see "Process Changes in Unemployment Insurance Claims Statistical Reporting," in the January 1997 issue of Trends), that multiple jobholding has a seasonal component; the lead article can be interpreted as demonstrating that there is a substantial structural component underlying multiple jobholding in the north central region⁽¹⁾. These facts raise a serious question about the validity of the establishment survey as the source of information about aggregate demand in the labor market since the intervening variable--multiple jobholding--is both large and unaccounted for.

A solution to the problem of measuring the aggregate demand for labor would be to produce a current measure of total payroll. Conversion from a dependence upon the measurement of jobs with unknown and changing true value valences would eliminate the problem of noncomparability across states, Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), and the U.S. as a whole. Given the time lag between the periods in time, a problem is identified in a Bureau of Labor Statistics program, and the development of a national solution, it is suggested that the states begin to statistically model their quarterly payroll information and present the results to the public as an alternative measure of the aggregate demand for labor.

Tom Gallagher is the Manager of Research & Planning.

1 It is also evident that this "structural" argument can be extended to the analysis of multiple jobholding over the business cycle. Whether or not the establishment survey measures the same thing during an economic contraction that it does during an expansion is a testable hypothesis.

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