Friday's job report is a critical jobs report. Last month the number was skewed high by a seasonal factor that had never been used for the month of September  going back to  1980. The growth of jobs is slower now, through the first nine months of the year, than it was during 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.  We saw near record levels of people working two jobs hit a near record high for September and set a new record for September for people working two part-time jobs. The escalation of the the dual job holder has scarcely received any attention this year. The problem is that elevated levels of people working two jobs skews the unemployment claims data. If people lose a full-time job and still have a art-time job they are ineligible for unemployment benefits.

What should we expect this Friday?

There are over Two Million People Working Two Part-time Jobs. This is important to note. Part-time workers do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) unless the employer has the full-time equivalent of 50 workers working 2080 hours a year (104,000 hours.) A full-time employee is one who works 30 hours or more a week (1560 hours a year)  according to the ACA. It would require 66.67 PT workers working 30 hours a week to equal 50 workers working 40 hours. The number of employers with under 50 employers providing health insurance to their employees has dropped from 57% during 2008 to 47% for 2016.   Are more people working multiple part-time jobs because small employers do not want to pay for health care benefits?

Will the Number of people working Two Part-time jobs jump by 2% or 12%? The last time we saw the PT PT number drop during October was during October 2005 and October 2006. We even saw PT PT gains during October of 2008 as the wheels were coming off the economy. A 2% increase in PT PT jobs would mean that the September level of 2.087 million would increase to 2.129 million workers.This would be higher than 2013 and 2015 and approaching the October Record of 2014. A 10.92% increase(Election Year 2012)  would get us to  2.315 million workers who are working two PT jobs. If we see a spike like we did during 2014 (a mid-term election year) we could see 2.353 million people working two part-time jobs.

We could see a spike of half a million part-time jobs this October,  according to the data crunched for the forecast column, how many will be working two part-time jobs?

How bad is the economy if we see a drop in multiple job holders as we did during 2001?