We had a chilly and wet weekend here in Minnesota. Since our seasons are so extreme, we count on nice summer weather June through August before weather slides into fall and winter. With rain almost all day yesterday and temperatures in the 50s when we went to the garden center today, quite a few people were grumbling.

Last night, the ‘weather elf’ on our local newscast talked about how ‘unfortunate’ it was that the work week was going to start with sunny days with a high of 80 degrees. I guess he thought it was unfortunate because every one would be back at work on Monday, after a miserable weather weekend.

Since I definitely wasn’t going to work and would gladly be enjoying Monday’s sunshine, I started wondering how many people this is really unfortunate for? After all, not everyone goes to work on Monday morning, do they?

I decided to explore exactly how many people DO go to work on a Monday morning.

It turns out, a lot of people aren’t going to work today. There are 325 million people in the USA and this chart (from JobEnomicsBlog.com) shows that less than half of the country (150 million, or 46%) has a job of any sort:

And, not all of those 150 million folks work full-time either – about one-fifth of those are part-time (28 million) are part-time. Part-time employment has been growing steadily – a lot of these people work weekends and evenings. Self-employed people also total about 12 million of the working folks – they tend to have more flexibility in where & when they work, though many keep office hours.

The 94 million ‘not in the labor force’ on the chart are mostly retirees, but also include some stay-at-home parents. We fall in the ‘not in the labor force’ group and can time shift our activities to take advantage of the weather.

I assume the 16 million unemployed people are busy looking for a job and are ‘working’ at finding one on a Monday morning. I hope that’s the case, at least, for their sake.

Lastly, you might note that their are 64 million Americans ‘missing’ from the chart. These are mostly kids: some too small to go to school and others off on summer break – or soon to be. Year-round school hasn’t caught on in Minnesota (yet) – with our harsh winters, I’m not sure kids would want to have their vacation spread out into the other seasons.

By my math, I think these numbers imply that only about 35% of folks are ‘unfortunately’ heading to work this morning in Minnesota – missing the sunny, good weather after being stuck with the relatively bad weather this weekend. We left ourselves some outdoor yard work for Monday and Tuesday, so I’ll be making the most of the nice weather – with most people, I guess.

Image Credit: Pixabay