Full time as a percentage of population rose to 49.18 in August after peaking in July, as is typical, at 49.28.
The measure ebbs after summer and flows in the spring, mirrored by a peak oscillation in usually part-time employment in the winter, which is a much smaller part of the population, historically averaging 27+ million in the years before the latest catastrophe.
The 48.3% average to date in 2021 is one full point ahead of the average for 2020 at 47.3%, but remains far off the 2019 average at 50.4%, which itself hardly represented a return to what was normal before the Great Financial Crisis.
Full time work never recovered after GFC I, which exposed the hollowed out character of the US economy after decades of out-sourcing, off-shoring, and mass low-wage immigration.