"Spehro Pefhany" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 13 Aug 2003 15:45:54 GMT, the renowned "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


A lot of minimum-wage retail work is discretionary. They may have just
decided not to bother.

With the big number being at the end of the year and the other in
summer, you may have the Xmas temporary workers being counted in one
and not the other. And there's all those part-time workers (the better
not to have to pay benefits). How are they being counted?

But getting a real analysis of things like this takes quite a bit of
time.
I'll defer to someone who's interested in chasing it down.

Sure, fair enough. It was more a rhetorical question or invitation to
speculation than a demand for more work. ;-)

I think those aggregate Labor Dept. figures include part-time workers, but
I'm not sure, because I don't spend much time with the aggregates. You can
peel them off by looking at the hours/worker figures, which are available
from some Labor Dept. tables.

I'm thinking of paying for Stat-USA or one of the other services to make
this job easier, but I spent some time with Stat-USA at a county library and
I didn't find it much easier than the system I've set up for the free
sources of data.

--
Ed Huntress
(remove "3" from email address for email reply)