No, they did nothing of the sort. Look they have no actual numbers for that. So they relied upon two stats:
Breakdown of people who hold multiple jobs
That shows that very very few people work 70 or 80 hours a week. True, it doesn’t say anything about how many work 60 hours. That is outside the scope of the factoid.
“The average number of hours worked in the private sector has hugged tightly to about 34.5 hours a week since 2006,…”
Which shows that not many work 60 hours either.
BUT!! In any case, the BLS does not use either of those factors in determining the official unemployment rate.
So,* her entire claim* is utterly false. Unemployment is **NOT **low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment isNOTlow because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family."
Because even if everyone had two jobs and/or people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family- it would not change Unemployment stats in the slightest.
So, yes, perhaps a good number of people are working 60 hours a week. However, that number can’t be too high since the average number of hours worked in the private sector is about 34.5 hours a week .
But it wouldn’t make any difference at all. She’d still be 100% wrong.
She simply doesnt understand how they calculate the Unemployment rate.“They don’t get counted twice if they have two jobs. So Ocasio-Cortez is wrong in saying multiple job holding and long hours affect the unemployment rate.”
Oh, also this statistic was bothering me because it seemed absurdly low, so I looked into it and it’s also false. That number could only be a valid measure of how many hours people are actually working if you assume that businesses never press people to work unpaid overtime, which is clearly not the case, AND if you believe that no one at all on salary ever works more than a standard 40 hour week. So even the stat that actually seemed to contradict her claim on first glance clearly doesn’t reflect the actual number of hours worked in the US!
The BLS number that they’re using is based off of a survey sent to employers only. For hourly employees, businesses report how much overtime they pay, and there is no attempt at all to account for situations where businesses making people work without paying them. For salaried and commission-based employees, they are to report that people worked their standard hours regardless of how many hours they worked. So the survey that generates that ‘average number of hours worked’ explicitly says to treat any salaried person who works an 80 hour week as working 40 hours!
To generate an actual picture of average hours worked, the BLS would need to do some kind of survey of workers and reconcile any difference in the hours they report working with the hours business report paying. AND they would need to modify the survey to have businesses report the number of hours that salaried and commissioned people work. They’re not likely to do this, because the current information is already collected by the payroll department (by law) and submitting it is easy, while recording hours worked for salaried workers would be new and not required, and the worker survey would be new and could not be done through businesses.
It’s pretty obvious that she was not trying to state that the BLS statistic is determined from those numbers. Taking a weirdly over-literal reading of a statement and calling it false doesn’t indicate that the statement is actually false, but that you’re grasping at straws.
And doesn’t address the fact that the politifact article made multiple blatantly false claims.
I’ve shown that the statistic that claims to show that is based on data that doesn’t actually support that claim. Most notably, that statistic treats anyone working a salaried job as working only 40 hours per week, never more, which is simply absurd.
Dr. Deth has it exactly right, and fortunately I read his/her post before responding, or I would’ve covered the same ground in many more words. But to sum up: yes, Ocasio-Cortez’s claims are absolutely false, based on the statistics: about 5% of Americans work 2+ jobs, not “everybody”; and when the average number of hours worked is around 35, the fraction of folks working 60-80 is going to be very low–again, very far from “everyone.”
Pantastic, it seems that your big beef is that you don’t believe the statistics, and you might be right. I would say to that two things, though. First, mathematically the stats would have to be INSANELY wrong to support anything like the claims O-C is making. The listed stat for number of hours worked is about half what she claims is standard. To make her figure remotely accurate, we’d have to assume, what, a 55-hour workweek for the averaqge employee? That’s an awful lot of missing hours. Similarly for the multiple job people (I by the way am one of them): if even 75% of the population is working two jobs (still not all that close to “everyone”) then the official stats are missing practically all of the folks who are holding two jobs. Neither of these seems at all credible to me.
Second, those stats are basically the ones we have to go on. We can assume all we like that x% of the people listed as working 40-hour works are actually working 80-hour weeks, but as you say we have no way of knowing whether we’re right about the value of x. Is it 2%? 10%? 35%? 78.5%? Your guess is as good as mine. Politifact is using the stats that are out there to evaluate the claim; that’s what they should do and I have no problem with that. It’s worth noting that they reached out to the candidate’s campaqign for further information (“According to this study…” “Here’s a report that says…”), but got no response. Even the campaign wasn’t prepared to back up the assertion.
Look, as I say I think it’s quite possible that the stats are wrong, but I don’t see any way they’re so wrong as to make O-C’s comment reasonable. My guess would be that she knows a few people who do work 60-80 hours and has met others in her campaign, and that she has run into a bunch of people who do hold two jobs, and she was happy to use this anecdotal information because it matches her world view and it’s a narrative she wants to push. Which is reasonable. But then she should say “I have met a lot of people who…” or “When I talk to people in this district, many of them tell me…” or even “I’m worried about the number of folks I meet who…” instead of making up a statistic that simply doesn’t hold water. I might simply have called it False rather than Pants on Fire, but I won’t quibble with gtheir overall review, which I agree is well deserved.
My big beef is that there are multiple outright lies in the politifact article, which makes the entire site suspect. One of the lies is that certain statistics mean something that they simply don’t. The stats are, in fact, INSANELY wrong, the average numbers of hours worked in the US is simply not close to 35. I’ve pointed out that number is generated by treating people working salaried jobs as never working more than a standard 40 hour week, which bears no relation to reality, and the assumption that businesses never, ever have anyone work unpaid overtime, which is hilariously naive.
Another beef is:
Treating common figures of speech as literal mathematical statements doesn’t show anything but a lack of language understanding on the part of the person. Hyperbole, metaphor, and other non-literal forms of speech are common, especially in political speeches. When someone says ‘everyone’ when making an impassioned point, it typically means something between ‘a lot of people’ and ‘a majority of people’, it isn’t actually being used to mean literally every person. Anyone competent to critique American political speeches needs to understand basic American English; if you apply the same absudly literal interpretation to FDR’s famous ‘fear itself’ speech and turned up a plethora of “false” statements.
The article clearly missed what she was actually communicating, in addition to containing a bunch of outright lies and false statistics. If someone says “everyone is working two jobs, this is a problem” and you respond with “Bob is not working two jobs, therefore your claim isn’t true, therefore I win” you aren’t going to actually convince anyone that you won.
I can think of nothing better for her campaign that for her opponent to treat the politifact article as true and base speeches and such on it. A rich white guy sitting around claiming that average Americans only work 35 hours a week and virtually no one works two jobs is going to get a lot of her voters to the polls. If I was her campaign I certainly wouldn’t mess with such a great gift!
*This is wrong for two reasons. First, people working multiple jobs has no distorting effect on the unemployment rate, which is calculated by taking the number of unemployed people and dividing it by the number of people in the labor force. The raw number of jobs being worked by Americans has no bearing on these numbers.
Second, everyone does not have two jobs. As Bloomberg View’s Noah Smith points out, only about 5 percent of workers are moonlighting. This rate has actually dropped slightly over the last three decades.*
*When Hoover asked the young candidate to address the unemployment rates—currently at a 17-year low—Ocasio-Cortez took issue with the facts. “The numbers you just talked about is part of the problem,” she said. “You look at the figure and say oh, unemployment is low, everything is fine. Well, unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week, and can barely feed their kids.”
You hardly have to be an economist to understand just how wrong Ocasio-Cortez’s statement truly is. First, as Noah Smith of Bloomberg pointed out, the number of Americans working two jobs is around 5 percent of the workforce, another historic low. But, much more importantly, the candidate’s claim suggests she has no idea what unemployment actually means. “The unemployment rate,” as Robby Soave helpfully explained in Reason, “is calculated by taking the number of unemployed people and dividing it by the number of people in the labor force. The raw number of jobs being worked by Americans has no bearing on these numbers.”*
https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-everyone-have-two-jobs-1532474015
*But Bureau of Labor Statistics data show only a small minority of Americans work multiple jobs. That percentage has been around 5% of working Americans since 2010, though it was higher before then. Last month 7.6 million, or 4.9%, of the 155.5 million working Americans had multiple jobs.
Are people working “60, 70, 80 hours a week”? Rarely. But for a brief dip during the recession, private-sector employees have worked an average of 34.2 to 34.6 hours a week since BLS began tracking the data in 2006. The average stood at 34.5 hours in June.
BLS considers 35 hours a week “full time,” so working 70 or 80 hours would be equivalent to two full-time jobs. Only 360,000 people worked two full time jobs in June—0.2% of the workforce. There may well be people working 60 hours a week or more on one job—but if that were common, the overall average for hours worked would be well above 34.5.*
The Bureau of Labor Statistics gets its unemployment figure by measuring the number of available workers without a job, and actively looking for one, against the people who have at least one job. You don’t get counted twice if you have two jobs.
What’s more, BLS says about 5 percent of employed people have more than one job. And it says about 4.8 percent of people working two jobs have two full-time jobs, which would require about 80 hours a week. That amounts to a teeny percentage of the workforce plugging away double time.
So the idea that people holding multiple jobs makes the unemployment rate misleadingly low is inaccurate and totally misrepresents how things work.
*
So, it’s not just Politifact, it’s every single media article I could find with a easy search. They all said she was dead wrong.
No, it doesnt do that either. Most people work one job, 40 hours, then a lot work one job part time. A few work one job 50 hours or so. The average is just under 40 hours.
And yet another problem: BLS doens’t actually even collect data on independent contractors in their regular data. They did a one-time survey in 2017 (last one was in 2005), but even that only asked people about their primary job. So someone working for Uber on the side doesn’t count as having two jobs in their numbers, and the hours they work at Uber aren’t added to the hours at their regular job to get the ‘35 on average’ figure. Someone who works salaried at an office all day for 50 hours a week and runs a youtube or camgirl channel at night for 30 hours a week counts as having one job where they only working 40 hours a week.
A person dealing with facts would have to treat someone working 80 hours a week but only getting paid a standard salary as working 80 hours, but the BLS only counts them as working 40. The facts say that someone working a day job, then driving for Uber at night has two jobs, but the BLS counts that as one job, and only counts hours from the first job.
I never realized how out of date the BLS methodology was, and how it paints an absurdly optimistic picture of the job situation in the US. The very situation she’s talking about (people working side jobs, and people working long hours at one job) are for the most part explicitly not even counted in the numbers people are citing to say that the problem she’s talking about is insignificant!
Yes, it is out of context. No one even mentions the first line “You look at the figure and say oh, unemployment is low, everything is fine,” which makes it clear that what she’s talking about is not the actual calculation of the unemployment rate, but the fact that the low unemployment number doesn’t actually mean that people have good jobs. And interpreting ‘everyone’ in speech as meaning ‘literally every single person’ is just hilariously robotic and demonstrates a lack of understanding of real-world English usage.
This is a lot like listening to FDR say “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” and pointing out that we did actually have many things to fear, such as the ongoing war in China, rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe, massive unemployment and worldwide depression, and more. Or taking a line from it the speech like “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization,” and pointing providing pictures showing that money changers actually work in normal-height seats in offices, not high seats in a temple, and that our civilization doesn’t even have a temple.
This whole post is a good example of ignoring context and interpreting what you do look at overly literally, BTW. She was obviously not attempting to make a claim about the calculation of the unemployment rate, but rather that the low unemployment rate is not indicative of economic prosperity for normal people. The weird cause and effect relationship that people are criticizing simply isn’t actually there in the original statement, it’s inaccurate and totally misrepresents both the literal words in the statement and the clear meaning of the statement.
As I’ve pointed out, the data Bloomberg’s Noah Smith cites is doesn’t support that claim. The data explicitly doesn’t include someone who works job during the week and drives Uber all weekend, someone who works at a restaurant while doing freelance art commissions on the side, someone who works as a secretary during the day and a camgirl at night, and a host of other people.
As I’ve pointed out, the 34.5 hours per week figure relies on counting someone working 60, 70, 80 hours a week at a salaried job as working only 40. It doesn’t add together hours for someone working multiple jobs, and doesn’t include any hours done as an independant contractor or other non-standard employment arrangement, like driving for Uber or running a side business.
This is simply not true, BTW. Working 80 hours at one salaried job is treated as working 40 hours at one job in the BLS survey used to generate these numbers, not as the equivalent of two full-time jobs. Working
What do you think the actual number is? Do you think it’s 45 hours a week? or 55? Or more? And what do you base that on? And please don’t say that you know a lot of people who… or any other form of anecdotal evidence.
As I suggested before, for O-C’s statement to make any sense at all you have to assume that the average workweek is in the nature of 55 hours, or 20 more than the official stats suggest. That’s a lot of hours missing. Essentially, you’re claiming that the average worker is working 11 hours a day, every day, five days a week. That’s four hours a day more than the statistics show, three hours more every day than the standard 40-hour week. The AVERAGE worker…so at least half of American workers are working that much or more. Yes, I do find this assumption to be INSANE :). If I’m wrong, where are the actual numbers? What’s the evidence?
I’m not suggesting that the stats are exactly right, or necessarily even close to it…but Politifact should not accept anecdotal evidence as “fact” when there are numbers out there, even ones that are potentially flawed.
Thank you for the treatise, I guess. Politifact noted this and specified that the claim was false even allowing for the hyperbole.
So would you say that 5% is “a lot of people” or “a majority of people”? To me it means a “small proportion of the population.” If a Republican said that “everybody” earned in excess of $400,000 a year, would you be okay with that? A local official here spoke out against building a county swimming pool a few years back because “everybody has swimming pools in their back yards.” He was (rightly IMO) pilloried for this. Do you think this was an acceptable use of “everybody”?
Or if you think 5% is under by an enormous amount and the figure really is 35% or 50% or 75%, where’s the evidence?
She doesn’t have any reasonable opposition in the general election so doesn’t need to worry about this. There’s no downside in responding. Moreover, if she decides she wants to run for governor or senator at some point, when she will have a much wider pool of voters to convince, she might be well advised to be a little less…hyperbolic. Wouldn’t it be better for her campaign to say “Hi Politifact, you’re wrong, and here’s a study that demonstrates that the actual number of hours is…and we prefer this methodology because…”? Then you’re fighting ignorance, and you’re convincing people like me who want numbers. This way it looks like they don’t care or don’t have any counter-evidence.
Look, this is not a big huge hairy deal. Compared to the lies that Trump and his minions utter every day, it doesn’t come close to making the charts. These “stats” fit O-C’s world view and push her narrative along, and if you’re sympathetic to that view it’s reasonable to feel like you’re being nitpicked. Hey, I’m very sympathetic to the argument that many people are working too hard for not enough reward. To the extent it’s a lie, it’s a lie in the service of an important point, and that seems to mitigate it somehow… But then, that’s what defenders of Trump seem to say every time Sarah Sanders opens her mouth, and that gives me pause when I feel like saying “anything goes.”
To me the bottom line is that O-C is a public figure who should expect that her words are going to be scrutinized, and given a rating of “False” or “Pants on Fire” when they do not express the facts, and that’s what she signed up for when she decided to run for office. As I said, there were other ways she could’ve gotten her point across without using phony statistics. Up there with making up justifications for war in Iraq? Not a chance. But ultimately a problem in its own way.
No, if you actually listen to the video, she was talking about the BLS Unemployment rate.
Yes, that’s true, of course she didnt mean "everyone’, but she clearly meant a lot of people, perhaps a majority of people.
No, that’s not true. You keep saying that but the 34 hours is based upon a survey.
Altho that is true, the survey shows otherwise. However, if you worked 80 hours a week at one job , 40 of them would be overtime. Few employers will do this, it is very costly.
In any case, you have not made any case at all for Politifact lying. They are using the same stats and numbers- in fact the ONLY stats and numbers that are available. Those same stats & numbers were also used by many other media sites to make the exact same conclusions that Politifact did. So, if Politifact is lying so is the rest of the media. And at that point, you are slipping into aluminum foil hat conspiracy realms.
You can make a case that the numbers do not, in every case, reflect reality. And sure, that *is *quite possible. But you forget that those are the ONLY numbers.
So, if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thinks that a lot of people are working longer hours (not at two jobs) *she has absolutely nothing to back that up.
*
All she was doing was what members of the party out of power always do. Try to tell you how much the economy actually sucks and then reach for a dumb argument to back it up, like “People have given up looking for work!” AOC just reached for an even dumber explanation than usual.
Politifact does a simple job and they do it well. What conclusion you choose to draw from it is up to you.
To me, I support much of what AOC stands for, but I’m not going to give her a pass for careless statements or repeating “common knowledge”.
Others may reason that there is sometimes a need in politics for rhetoric that bends the truth to make a clear point (I wouldn’t).
I also don’t consider it particularly noteworthy that Clinton had a good score. To the extent that she was “fake” it was mostly in her demeanor and usually choosing to do what she thought was politically expedient. She didn’t actually lie much, despite Conservatives throwing a swamp’s worth of mud.
You’ll notice where she did lie it was often on the issues of scandals. Her lack of transparency and her willingness to bend the truth or outright lie about them gave republicans a target rich environment.
I wouldn’t agree with that characterization. Most of the scandals were pure bull.
And looking on politifact, the only scandal she seemed to lie about was the email thing.
If she’s target rich, then…well anyone who’s opened their eyes in the last two years can finish that sentence.
I disagree. If someone occasionally gets a fact wrong, then I can understand that. But if someone consistently and constantly tells untruths because they can’t be bothered to get the facts, then they are lying.
Someone makes a mistake. Okay, it happens. But the key is how they react to being told they were wrong. An honest person admits the mistake and doesn’t repeat it. A liar admits no mistake and just keeps plugging.
Do we have any data on AO-C’s reaction to this info?