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 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 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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Excerpts from “The Book of Jobs,” Joseph E. Stiglitz, Vanity Fair:
“There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.”
In a regular monthly exercise in statistical flim-flam, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released the jobless numbers for November 2011.
The meaningless unemployment rate in the headlines: 8.6%, down a whopping 0.4% from last month. The real unemployment rate: 15.6% (includes people who no longer get unemployment benefits, need work but have stopped looking because it’s futile, or have only found part-time work). Some even put that real rate at 18.8. Learn more here.
In a regular monthly exercise in statistical flim-flam, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released the jobless numbers for October 2011.
The meaningless unemployment rate in the headlines: 9% , down a whopping 0.1%. The real unemployment rate: 16.2% (includes people who no longer get unemployment benefits, need work but have stopped looking because it’s futile, or have only found part-time work). Learn more here.
There was a net gain of 80,000 jobs in the past month, not all of them at McDonald’s (some were at Wendy’s). At that rate, all of America’s 13.9 million unemployed should be working by about 2030.
Related:
“Most unemployed Americans are no longer receiving unemployment benefits,” Christopher S. Rugaber, AP via New York Daily News
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“Policy makers struggling to understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills afflicting the world would do well to study the works of a long-dead economist: Karl Marx.”
“The wily philosopher’s analysis of capitalism had a lot of flaws, but today’s global economy bears some uncanny resemblances to the conditions he foresaw.”
“As he wrote in ‘Das Kapital,’ companies’ pursuit of profits and productivity would naturally lead them to need fewer and fewer workers, creating an ‘industrial reserve army’ of the poor and unemployed: ‘Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery.’
The process he describes is visible throughout the developed world, particularly in the U.S. Companies’ efforts to cut costs and avoid hiring have boosted U.S. corporate profits as a share of total economic output to the highest level in more than six decades, while the unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent and real wages are stagnant.
U.S. income inequality, meanwhile, is by some measures close to its highest level since the 1920s. Before 2008, the income disparity was obscured by factors such as easy credit, which allowed poor households to enjoy a more affluent lifestyle. Now the problem is coming home to roost.”
Who wrote that? The Senior Economic Adviser at UBS, the Swiss bank. Read it all:
“Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy,” George Magnus, Bloomberg
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released the jobless numbers for August 2011.
The official unemployment rate, the one in the headlines, is 9.1%. The real unemployment rate: 16.2% (includes people who no longer get unemployment benefits, need work but have stopped looking because it’s futile, or have only found part-time work). The official rate hasn’t changed from last month, the real rate has grown by a tenth of a percent. Learn more here.
45,000 jobs were temporarily lost in the Verizon strike, and those workers are back on the payroll this month, but the 17,000 government jobs eliminated last month are permanently gone. While 62,000 private sector jobs were added in August, this is no comfort to America’s 14 million unemployed. More that 6 million of them have been out of work for over six months.
