Census data released last week show that as the country and labor market continued to recover from the pandemic, a rapidly growing share of adults were working a substantial amount of the year.
The fact that this rise was similar for parents and non-parents alike should ease concerns that the monthly #ChildTaxCredit would cause large numbers of parents to choose not to work.
In fact, 2021 shows it’s possible for a historic rebound in steady work to coincide with a historic strengthening of government support that drove a record decline in child poverty. Let’s look at the numbers.
The share of working age adults who worked more than 1,000 hours/year (equivalent to over half time) and the share working full-time year-round rose markedly for both parents and non-parents.
The share of working-age adults working over 1,000 hours a year (e.g., 40 hours for more than 25 weeks; or over 20 hours for 50 weeks) rose to 67.6 percent from about 64.2 percent in 2020 — larger than any one-year increase on record.
The number of full-time year-round workers age 18-64 rose by more than 10 million in 2021, Census said – the most since at least the 1980s. That rebound reversed about 80 percent of 2020’s pandemic-related loss of 13 million full-time year-round workers.
(Census tables show the overall numbers of full-time year-round workers; the rest of the figures here are from CBPP analysis of the Census survey data.)
Moreover, the increase in the share of working-age adults who worked full-time year-round was quite similar for those living in families with related children under 18, compared with those without children. (The increase was non-significantly larger for those with children.)
Monthly Child Tax Credit payments began mid-way through 2021.
If very large numbers of adults had decided not to work in response to the #ChildTaxCredit, we would not expect to see measures of substantial employment — both working more than half time & working full-time yr-round — rise about the same for people w/ and w/o kids.
In addition, compared with adults with no children, adults in families with children climbed back closer to their pre-pandemic rates of half-time and year-round work. So it’s not just that parents lost more ground in 2020 than others and had more ground to make up.
Note that the share of adults working at any point in the year didn’t change much in 2020 or 2021. That’s not surprising.
By the time the pandemic really hit in March 2020, most adults had already worked some of the year. And by year’s end in 2021, most jobs had returned, so most adults worked some of 2021, too.
More research is needed, but this initial look finds no evidence that large numbers of parents decided they didn’t need to work.
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