Saturday, July 09, 2022

That "Jobs" Number: Look More Closely

We mentioned the el stinko Department of Labor "household" survey (of jobs) a couple of days ago, which showed a 315K loss in jobs last month.  

The 'household survey' is exactly what it sounds like.  In contrast, the Labor Department also runs an "establishment" survey, which measures jobs as reported by various classes of employers (establishments.)  The establishment survey showed +372K jobs last month That's quite a difference, no?

ZeroHedge found something else that's noteworthy.

...But things only get worse after that, because if one goes back a little more, one finds that something appears to have broken a few months ago, around March, when the Establishment Survey kept on rising unperturbed, while the Household Survey hit some unexplained brick wall, and hasn't moved at all....

 ...digging in even deeper, we find that this drop in Household Survey employment is the result of both full-time and part-time jobs. In fact, as shown below, since March, the US has lost 70K full-time employees and 462K part-time employees.

Wha??  How does this happen??  Department of Labor's Establishment Survey finds hundreds of thousands of job gains, Household Survey finds hundreds of thousands of jobs lost??

Easy!

...The offset? Multiple jobholders, or people who have more than one job.

As shown below, while  the number of total employees (per the Household Survey) has stagnated, the number of multiple jobholders has been growing steadily, hitting a new post-covid high in June of 7,541 million....

(Graphs are at the link)

So--for whatever reason--lots of people are holding a couple of part-time jobs (some even hold two full-time jobs!) which pumps up the Establishment Survey numbers.  At the same time, Household Survey shows lots of "jobs lost."  Both are true; the part-timers quit one job and take another.  They quit in droves as wages change, or as their conditions change.  Then they take jobs in droves, too.

Those "Leisure and Hospitality" jobs?  They're NOT full-time, but there are a lot of them. School bus drivers are NOT full-time, but there are a lot of them.   There are part-time manufacturing jobs, part-time customer-service jobs, part-time healthcare jobs......

Huh.

Will MSM cover this?  Don't make me laugh. 

Here's what passes for "journalism" on this topic from the Main Office of Propaganda (Little Local Pravda is merely a branch). 

Finally, another observation:

...University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business, Finance Professor Jeremy Siegel, takes a closer look at the June jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Professor Siegel notes a .01% drop in average hours worked is the labor equivalent of losing 450,000 jobs....

450K?  "It is to laugh", said Kamala.

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