A blog post from Mark Price, originally published on Third and State.

Welcome back from your Labor Day Holiday!

While we were releasing the State of Working Pennsylvania 2011 last week, the good people at the U.S. Department of Labor released their latest nationwide data on the August employment picture. Here is a run down of the main points from Washington's leading labor economists.

Heidi Shierholz notes troubling trends in hours of work:

"The length of the average workweek declined in August to 34.2 hours. Average hours have dropped in the last three months, have seen no net growth over the last year, and have thus far made up just over half of what they lost in the first 18 months of the downturn (the low point was 33.7 in June 2009). One thing this underscores is that the lack of hiring right now primarily indicates a lack of demand, and not an inability by businesses to find the right workers or because of uncertainty or concern about regulatory burdens. If the lack of hiring was occurring for some reason other than a lack of demand, we would see businesses strongly ramping up the hours of the workers they have. As it is, there remains substantial room to meet unmet demand by increasing hours of existing workers; if private-sector employers were to simply restore the hours of their workers back to pre-recession levels, that would be equivalent to adding over 1.2 million jobs at current average hours."