One interesting nugget in the June jobs report was the rise in the number of people who worked part-time. While it’s a number that flops around from month to month — the standard deviation is 287,000 — it jumped by 799,000, which was the largest one-month gain since January 1994. At the same time, there was a 523,000-person drop in full-time workers, the first decline since October. “It is unusual,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group. But he said it could be noise. And he notes that most of the part-time rise in June was not in those who want to find full-time work but couldn’t, and instead in those who voluntarily opted to do so. One concern with the Affordable Care Act was that some small employers might opt to get around the 50-person work requirement by replacing full-time workers with part-timers. That said, over the past 12 months, 10,000 new part-time jobs have been created — versus 2.12 million full-time jobs. And looking at the survey of establishments, it was high-paying sectors that were creating jobs in June. “These are not McDonald’s, Mickey Mouse kind of jobs,” Hoffman said. “This is a better-quality jobs story.” Hoffman said he wouldn’t be surprised if the number of part-time workers comes back to more normal readings in July and August. Source: http://blogs.marketwatch.com/