Housing and the self-employed
You may have noticed that the country's unemployment rate is hovering around 5 percent -- or at least heard the recession worries prompted by it. New government numbers show it's at least partly the result of fewer people working for themselves, Bloomberg notes.
Yes, this does have something to do with housing. Honest:
Hours worked by the self-employed dropped at a 15.5 percent annual pace in the last three months of 2007, the biggest decrease in 15 years, according to Labor Department data.The decline "is probably related to the housing downturn, since one in six workers in construction is self-employed, twice the average for all industries," said Patrick Newport, an economist at Global Insight, a Lexington, Mass., forecasting firm.
So are a variety of others in real estate, for that matter.
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