The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced employment figures for April 2013: 165,000 new jobs. No one knows exactly what that means, but one thing is certain: This number will certainly change. Does that indicate government ineptitude or political manipulation? No.
U.S. jobs grew by only 88,000 in March, less than half of recent monthly job increases, yet the unemployment rate was the lowest in four years, 7.6 percent. How come? People stopped looking, went back to school, or were otherwise no longer counted as unemployed. Was job growth a victim of austerity anticipation? Opinions differ.
“The billable-hour system is the way most lawyers in big firms charge clients, but it serves no one. Well, almost no one. It brings most equity partners in those firms great wealth. Law firm leaders call it a leveraged pyramid. Most associates call it a living hell.”
Five minutes of career guidance from C. G. P. Grey.
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Will “ObamaCare” kill jobs? The new Affordable Care Act healthcare reform law is modeled after the Massachusetts healthcare law, “RomneyCare,” and the Urban Institute recently studied the situation there. So has RomneyCare killed jobs in Massachusetts?
“Will the Affordable Care Act Be a Job Killer?” Lisa Dubay, John Holahan, Sharon K. Long, and Emily Lawton, Urban Institute Health Policy Center
But beware. ObamaCare will affect your job if your boss is a lunatic, right-wing, GOP ideologue:
Jack Welch is sticking to his conspiracy theory, no matter how much it’s debunked and ridiculed . The Bureau of Labor Statistics, he says, that bunch of technocrats long trusted by Wall Street, an outfit without political appointees, cooked the books and fiddled the September employment figures to give President Obama’s re-election campaign a mild boost. They must be lousy cooks, though, since the drop in joblessness was a measly fraction of one percent. Mr. Welch was much better at this kind of thing when he “managed earnings” as CEO of GE.
The US unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent in September, its lowest level in 44 months. Employers added 114,000 workers to payrolls last month, and 86,000 more jobs were created in July and August than previously thought. There’s a great chart here for you visual learners. As economic news, this is only mildly encouraging; as political news it’s better for the Obama campaign than for Mr. Romney.
The Republicans responded to these facts the way they usually do, with conspiracy theories. This time the lunatic accuser wasn’t Herman Cain , Michele Bachmann, or Donald Trump. This time it was former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who claimed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics manipulated the figures, the kind of thing Mr. Welch did at GE. The BLS isn’t GE, though.
“The population of undocumented immigrants in the US fell from 12 million to approximately 11 million during the height of the financial crisis (2008-09) …. And since then, Mexicans without documents aren’t migrating at rates to replace the loss, creating a net zero balance for the first time in 50 years.”
“Home again in Mexico: Illegal immigration hits net zero,” Sara Miller Llana, Christian Science Monitor (citing Douglas Massey, Mexican Migration Project, Princeton University)
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The December 2011 employment figures are out, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that last month saw an increase of 200,000 new jobs. At that rate it will be a mere 65 months before we get to full employment.
The BLS adjusts these statistics to account for seasonal variations so that temporary holiday jobs — evergreen salesmen, reindeer renters, maids-a-milking, department store Santas — don’t distort the figures. Some analysts aren’t sure the Bureau understands our 21st century retail supply chain, where orders on the InterWebz make temporary work for thousands of migratory warehouse gypsies and delivery drivers. Stay tuned for next month’s job numbers.
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“Around 800,000 veterans are jobless, 1.4m live below the poverty line, and one in every three homeless adult men in America is a veteran. Though the overall unemployment rate among America’s 21m veterans in November (7.4%) was lower than the national rate (8.6%), for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan it was 11.1%. And for veterans between the ages of 18 and 24, it was a staggering 37.9%, up from 30.4% just a month earlier.”
“Whatever the cause, this bleak trend is occurring as the last American troops leave Iraq at the end of this year, and as more than 1m new veterans are expected to join the civilian labour force over the next four years.”
–”A hard homecoming,” The Economist
Related: USA Leaves Iraq?
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