BLS Jobs Statistics at a Glance
Details from the monthly BLS Employment Report.
- Nonfarm Payroll: +210,000 to 148,611,000 – Establishment Survey
- Employment: +1,136,000 to 155,175,000– Household Survey
- Unemployment: -542,000 to 6,877,000- Household Survey
- Baseline Unemployment Rate: -0.4 to 4.2% – Household Survey
- U-6 unemployment: -0.5 to 7.8% – Household Survey
- Civilian Non-institutional Population: +121,000 to 262,029,000
- Civilian Labor Force: +594,000 to 162,052,000 – Household Survey
- Not in Labor Force: -473,000 to 99,977,000 – Household Survey
- Participation Rate: +0.2 to 61.8% – Household Survey
Job Revisions
- The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for September was revised up by 67,000 from +312,000 to +379,000
- The change for October was revised up by 15,000, from +531,000 to +546,000.
- With these revisions, employment in September and October combined is 82,000 higher than previously reported.
Part-Time Jobs
- Involuntary Part-Time Work: -137,000 to 4,286,000
- Voluntary Part-Time Work: -131,000 to 20,605,000
- Total Full-Time Work: +954,000 to 129,260,000
- Total Part-Time Work: +42,000 to 25,948,000
The above numbers never total correctly. I list them as reported.
Unemployment Rate – Seasonally Adjusted
Nonfarm Payrolls
Recovery Synopsis
- Jobs are up 18,450,000 from the low in April 2020.
- Jobs are down 3,912,000 from the February 2020 pre-Covid high.
Those numbers do not reflect increasing population or the type of job recovered.
Hours and Wages
Average weekly hours of all private employees rose 0.1 hour to 34.8 hours. Average weekly hours of all private service-providing employees was flat at 33.7 hours. Average weekly hours of manufacturers rose 0.1 hour to 40.1 hours.
Average Hourly Earnings of All Nonfarm Workers rose $0.08 to $31.03
Year-over-year, wages rose from $29.61 to $31.03. That’s a gain of 4.80%.
Average hourly earnings of Production and Supervisory Workers rose $0.12 to $26.40.
Year-over-year, wages rose from $24.93 to $26.40. That’s a gain of 6.02%.
For a discussion of income distribution, please see What’s “Really” Behind Gross Inequalities In Income Distribution?
Birth Death Model
Starting January 2014, I dropped the Birth/Death Model charts from this report.
For those who follow the numbers, I retain this caution: Do not subtract the reported Birth-Death number from the reported headline number. That approach is statistically invalid.
The model is wildly wrong at turning points but otherwise means little. It is also heavily revised and thus useless.
Alternative Measures of Unemployment
Table A-15 is where one can find a better approximation of what the unemployment rate really is.
The official unemployment rate is 4.2%. However, if you start counting all the people who want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.
U-6 is much higher at 7.8%. Both numbers would be way higher still, were it not for millions dropping out of the labor force over the past few years.
Some of those dropping out of the labor force retired because they wanted to retire. The rest is disability fraud, forced retirement, discouraged workers, and kids moving back home because they cannot find a job.
Covid-19 had an enormous impact on the labor force. Many dropouts are really unemployed but are not counted as such, said Fed Chair Jerome Powell over a year ago. That still holds true today.
Strength is Relative
It’s important to put the jobs numbers into proper perspective.
In the household survey, if you work as little as 1 hour a week, even selling trinkets on eBay, you are considered employed.
In the household survey, if you work three part-time jobs, 12 hours each, the BLS considers you a full-time employee.
In the payroll survey, three part-time jobs count as three jobs. The BLS attempts to factor this in, but they do not weed out duplicate Social Security numbers. The potential for double-counting jobs in the payroll survey is large.
Household Survey vs. Payroll Survey
The payroll survey (sometimes called the establishment survey) is the headline jobs number, generally released the first Friday of every month. It is based on employer reporting.
The household survey is a phone survey conducted by the BLS. It measures unemployment and many other factors.
If you work one hour, you are employed. If you don’t have a job and fail to look for one, you are not considered unemployed, rather, you drop out of the labor force.
Looking for jobs on Monster does not count as “looking for a job”. You need an actual interview or send out a resume.
These distortions artificially lower the unemployment rate, artificially boost full-time employment, and artificially increase the payroll jobs report every month.
Recovery Not Complete
This recovery has been fast, but it was also the deepest on record.
Some losses are permanent due to a surge in work-at-home and online shopping (less office space and malls needed).
Surprise of the Day
The surprise of the day was the enormous gain in the household survey employment by 1,136,000 vs a payroll gain of of only 210,000.
I will comment further on employment in a separate report.
It was this gain in employment that drove the unemployment rate lower by 0.4 percentage points.
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Mish
The covid
recession or whatever you want to call it caused the sharpest drop in
employment ever but thanks to the stimulus checks during the lockdowns and soon
after gave us the quickest rebound again ever recorded. I for one am not at all
unhappy that wages are rising rapidly and that companies have to pay up for
labor. It’s about time it happened because wages have been depressed too long.
Inflation has increased with it but that only underlines that demand for labor
is very strong. Paradoxically company profit have surged to new levels so
although they complain they are not doing to shabbily at all.
Corporate
profits:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corporate-profits
Maybe
higher wages feeding into higher volumes and prices are creating a virtuous
circle. We could say it is all due to government borrowing and that could be
true. Nevertheless priming the pump sometimes is not only the best way to go
but the only way to start the motor. Finding the sweet spot between good wage
growth, inflation and corporate profits is really not an easy thing to do but
it does leave us with lots of opportunity to criticize government policies and
the individuals attached to them. The U-6 at 7.8% is not great but not
too long ago it was above 10% so it is getting better and hopefully get better
still. I wonder if we had decided to attack the Great Recession of 2008 by
opening the money vanes then as we have now would the result would have been a
sharp recovery growth and wages? Instead we kept spending too low depending on
low interest rates to do the job. The result was anaemic growth with a high
deficit anyway, probably the worst combination, leading to widespread justified
social unrest. The only people not screwed were those on the high end.
But things
are changing irrespective of who is in office. I believe that we,
meaning the developed world and parts of the rest are barreling toward full
employment coupled with social unrest. It’s an unstable and very uncomfortable
situation but creative environments rarely are. I noticed that the markets are roaring,
labor is rare, wages are rising, company profits are great. When you ride the
tiger you have to hold on tight. We really do live in interesting times.