On May 13, 2007, at 10:45 PM, Marvin Gandall wrote:
> Do the BLS stats reflect household or payroll data?
>
> If the latter, wouldn't the agency then have two data sets for the
> same
> individual - showing in one case an average five day work week of
> 30 hours
> drawn on his/her Walmart time card and an average work week of 20
> hours from
> his/her bar job?
The hours data comes (or, if I were the Fed, come) from the payroll survey. Their focus is the job, not the worker, so there's no way to link the payroll data to the household side. And confidentiality requirements would probably make it impossible to link individual datapoints that way anyway.
The household survey does collect data on multiple jobholdings. About 6% of the labor force had more than one job in the mid-90s (the current data series begins in 1994); it's now about 5%.
Doug