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  • August Jobs Report: Unemployment Rate Stays 9.1%, Jobs Flat

    The unemployment rate remains at 9.1%, as the US economy failed to add any jobs in August, according to the latest report from the Department of Labor . The private sectors continues to add jobs. Notably, health care, retail trade, manufacturing, and mining led the way in hiring, while the public sector continued to lose jobs. Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose from 8.4 million to 8.8 million in August. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. About 2.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in August, up from 2.4 million a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 977,000 discouraged workers in August, down by 133,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.6 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in August had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • BLS Jobs Report: Unemployment at 9.1%

    The unemployment rate has edged up slightly to 9.1%, as the US economy only added 54,000 jobs in May, according to the latest report from the Department of Labor . There were some more signs of growth in some sectors--namely professional and business services, health care, and mining. In most other private sectors, employment was flat. It is in the government sector that jobs are still being lost. Here's a look at the unemployment trends from the Bureau of Labor Statistics : Here are some of the key data from other areas we like to track in the monthly jobs report: The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) was essentially unchanged in May at 8.5 million. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. In May, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, about the same as a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 822,000 discouraged workers in May, a decrease of 261,000 from a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.4 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in May had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. Read the full report from the BLS here .

  • James Hamilton: Inside the Numbers on Latest Unemployment Report

    According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report for December , released on Friday, the US unemployment rate has dropped to 9.4%. Good news, right? Not so much, says James Hamilton , writing at Econbrowser : Unfortunately, the household numbers look much less rosy when you look at them a little more closely. For one thing, the impressive December gain comes right after an estimated loss according to the household survey of 175,000 jobs in November and a whopping loss of 294,000 in October. How can the household survey be signaling a falling unemployment rate over the last 3 months if its measure of the number of people working has actually gone down? Hamilton goes on to provide an answer to that question, and his approach is very instructive: Let me use an average over the last two months to smooth out some of the wild volatility in the household employment numbers and highlight what's changed in terms of people's employment status. In November and December, the civilian noninstitutional population over age 16 increased by 180,000 per month. The figure below illustrates what would have happened if these new people had entered into the respective employment categories at the same rate as the existing population. For example, if 58% of those 180,000 new potential workers found jobs, the number of employed individuals would have increased by 105,000 each month. If in December the number of employed had increased by 105,000, the number of unemployed increased by 11,000, and the number not in the labor force by 64,000, then measures such as the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate would have been unchanged. Average additions (in thousands of people per month) that would have kept the unemployment rate, employment rate, and labor force participation rate unchanged between October and December. But we know that in reality, the unemployment rate was not unchanged, but fell from 9.7% in October to 9.4% in December. The figure below shows that this is attributable mathematically to the fact that almost 200,000 fewer workers were counted as being unemployed in December compared with October. Actual average monthly changes in November and December in the number of people in different employment categories, with the actual change minus the change predicted in the previous figure indicated in parentheses. Read Interpreting the employment numbers here .

  • One Positive in US Employment: Job Stability

    Top White House economic adviser Austin Goolsbee was on ABC's This Week yesterday, and he tried to strike an optimistic tone about jobs for 2011: While we haven't seen the final employment numbers for 2010, it is difficult to imagine that the official unemployment rate dropped much below 9.8%. And the deeper we look into the data, the more bleak the jobs picture for 2010 was. But Brookings Senior Fellow Gary Burtless highlights one under-reported piece of the story that could be a positive sign for hope: job stability improved in 2010. So if you have a job, you are less likely to lose that job than you were a year ago: For more of Burtless's prognosis for the job market, click here .

  • A Good Friday Jobs Report

    There are still roughly 15.0 million unemployed Americans. The jobless rate remains at 9.7%. The number of discouraged workers--Americans who have stopped looking for work because they believe there are no jobs--is still climbing and has now reached 1.0 million. And the number of marginally attached workers--still looking for work but not counted among the unemployed because they did not search for a job in the past month--is now up to 2.3 million. And yet, for people looking for good news, any good news, on the jobs front, March was a good month. Take a look at the far right of the below charts: Today's report from the Labor Department showed that the US Economy gained 167,000 jobs last month. Not a lot, but a positive turn nonetheless. Read the jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics here .

  • Reading the Future of Hiring in Temp Worker Data

    In the surprisingly positive (or at least less negative than expected) unemployment numbers last month, the category that showed the highest growth was "temporary workers." As Louis Uchitelle reports in the New York Times, 52,000 temporary workers were hired last month . The hiring of temp workers has, in the past two recessions, signaled a turnaround in unemployment and the economy. Uchitelle: As demand rose after the last two recessions, in the early 1990s and in 2001, employers moved more quickly. They added temps for only two or three months before stepping up the hiring of permanent workers. Now temp hiring has risen for four months, the economy is growing, and still corporate managers have been reluctant to shift to hiring permanent workers, relying instead on temps and other casual labor easily shed if demand slows again. So is the fourth quarter surge in temp hiring a sign of a faster, and not-so-jobless recovery? Bill McBride of Calculated Risk isn't so sure , and he points us to an article by the San Francisco Chronicle's Tom Abate, in which one Bureau of Labor Statistics economist suggests that we probably have to wait several months to start to see real job growth: BLS economist Amar Mann said an analysis by the San Francisco office suggests that employers are getting more sophisticated about using temp hiring as a clutch to downshift into recessions and upshift into recoveries. Mann said temp jobs started down a month after overall employment dropped during the 1990-91 recession. But by the 2001 downturn, employers started cutting temps about five months before they started issuing pink slips to the general workforce. In the current recession, he said, companies began shedding temps 12 months before they started cutting permanent payrolls. A similar pattern prevailed in the two prior recoveries, Mann said. Temp jobs came back at the same time as overall employment after the 1991 recovery. Temporary employment rebounded five months before the general job market turned positive following the 2001 dip. If that pattern holds, it could be next summer before general payrolls start to grow. Read In economic woes, firms count on temp workers here .

  • March Unemployment Figures--and the Bureau of Labor Statistics Methodology

    The Bureau of Labor Statistics released unemployment figures for March this morning. Nonfarm payroll employment dropped 663,000 jobs last month, and unemployment rose to 8.5%--the highest since November 1983 (when the rate was also 8.5%). Manufacturing was hardest hit, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, losing 161,000 jobs in March. Health Care was the only sector with an increase in jobs, adding a modest 8,000 jobs in the month. As bad as these numbers look, the Washington Post points out that the labor market is actually significantly weaker than the official report shows . Groups excluded from the official count include people who are working part time but would rather be working full time, people who want to work but haven't looked for a job in the past month, and people who have become discouraged and given up looking. If those groups are included, the unemployment rate is 16.2 percent, up slightly from February. The Post's Ed O'Keefe provides a good primer of exactly how the BLS goes about compiling and releasing the unemployment figures here: Read the BLS release here .