Friday, August 05, 2022

Big Job Gains? Not So Fast!

While Sponge Brain Poopy-Pants attempts to read his teleprompter and congratulates himself on the +528K jobs number, there is reason to believe that maybe it's. not. all.  that.

There are two different job indexes published by the Government.  One is "establishment" which surveys businesses to get its stats, and the other is "household" which surveys ...ahh......households!

There's a serious gap between the two reports.  (Charts and graphs at the link here)

...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 141K full-time employees and 78K part-time employees....

 ...This trend has persisted into June, when according to the BLS, the US labor force saw a 71K drop in full-time workers offset by a 384K gain in far lower paying part-timers (source). 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.

Oh.  So that +548K may include a bunch of part-time jobs taken.  A BIG bunch of them.

And that's not the most astonishing factoid.

...And even more remarkable: the number of multiple jobholders whose primary and secondary jobs are both full-time just hit a record high! Hardly the sign of a strong job market, one where people can afford to quit jobs at will....

TWO full-time jobs! 

...So what's going on here? The simple answer: Fewer people working, but more people working more than one job, a rotation which picked up in earnest some time in March and which has only been captured by the Household survey....

And maybe--just maybe--the Administration is massaging the numbers and won't reconcile them with reality until.........say............December, a month after the mid-terms.

But that's only "maybe," right? 

Same stuff here, Fox News making the points.

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