The number of dual-income families in which husband and wife both work declined last year for the first time since the federal government began tracking the numbers nearly a decade ago.
Economists and labor specialists attributed this to a surge in the numbers of unemployed people in an economy that has shed nearly 3 million jobs since the 2001 recession, forcing more couples to rely on one partner's earnings. The causes of the recent drop, they said, are clearly economic, rather than evidence of a permanent deterioration in what has been one bedrock of modern American families: a working husband and wife.
There were 28.873 million married, dual-income couples last year, down from 29.241 million in 2001, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed yesterday by the Chicago outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. Since 1994, the number of families in which both husband and wife worked rose every year and peaked in 2001, before last year's reversal.
A decision by both spouses to work "is how families make ends meet and raise the standard of living," but it "has finally been superseded for the first time in this recession by the job losses," said John Challenger, chief executive of the company. "They've overcome the long-term trend."
The rise of the two-income family in recent decades has occurred as more women entered the labor force. Denis McSweeney, head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Northeast region, said his agency predicted women's participation in the labor force will continue to rise in coming years, though at a slower rate. In other words, women will continue to bolster family incomes.
McSweeney noted that hardships inflicted by the loss of one income vary widely among families, depending on their income.
"If you're a high-earner family, you have a lot more discretionary income," he said. "Most of them own homes and they take more vacations than anyone else. It's a little different if you're scratching around, and you're trying to raise a family with a couple of kids. It's a little more difficult if you only have one person working."
For low-income families, fixed costs -- for food, transportation, and housing -- take "a bigger chunk out of your overall income," he said.
Median income for two-income households was more than $66,000 in 2001, compared with about $34,500 when just one family member worked, Challenger said.
While the economy's growth rate has strengthened in recent months, that hasn't translated yet to an improvement in the employment market. There were 8.38 million unemployed Americans last year, up from 6.8 million in 2001, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In August, the nation shed another 93,000 jobs.
A drop in two-income families "suggests there's some real risk here to consumer spending, which has kept the economy afloat over the past two years and has kept us from falling into a much deeper recession," Challenger said.
According to federal data, in 1994 there were 27 million two-income married couples. That figure topped 29 million in 2000 and 2001 but has now fallen back to 1999 levels.
The current trend may contrast to the 1991-92 recession. James Pedderson, a Challenger, Gray spokesman, said other, earlier BLS data show that in the early 1990s, the number of married families with two incomes rose every year, though these data do not specify if a husband and wife both worked. That data also included families in which other members -- say, a teenager -- worked. The number of two-income families rose 271,000 on average each year from 1990 through 1993, he said.
"The numbers would indicate this recession seems to be hitting two-income families harder than previous recessions," Pedderson said.
Kimberly Blanton can be reached at blanton at globe.com.
==================================== To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren't any. [Les Paul]