by Aegidius25
This Thursday the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released it’s monthly employment report. I’ve long had a problem with the numbers this government agency puts out. Over the years they have been brazenly manipulated and much of the data it purports to show isn’t much more than a glorified guess. The report is made up of at least two elements; first the household survey from which it gets the official unemployment rate (11.1% for June) and second a so-called establishment survey.
The first is just what it sounds like, an in person or telephone survey of US households compiled to figure out what proportion of workers in the labor force are employed. By contrast the establishment survey is a combination survey and guesstimate. The first element surveys about 144,000 business establishments and government agencies compared to the about 32,500,000 businesses that used to be estimated to exist in the US; collecting data on numbers of workers at each firm, their hours worked and earnings. The second element is essentially a fancy formula used to guess at the number of new business establishments created or destroyed in the unsuryed segment of the economy. (Note: It is likely the number of surveyed firms has also declined with the downturn.)
From here the BLS comes up with an average number of jobs created or destroyed with all of these firms, giving us by far the biggest part of this figure in this survey. (+4,800,000 in June). But these numbers don’t capture the whole picture. First because they only survey workers considered in the labor force as noted above. This means workers who have been out of work for a period considered too long by the government and thus no longer eligible to collect unemployment benefits are no longer counted as unemployed affecting laborforce participation rate (61.5%).
Furthermore this survey propurts to show a significant uptick in leisure and hospitality workers returning to work for the month of June (+2,100,000) making up about two-fifths of the month’s supposed job gains. The magnitude of such an increase is hard to believe given the depressed state of the travel industry, though restaruant reopenings could account for some of this. However we should wonder about the sustainability of any such growth given the possibily of a second wave and the impacts such a development could have on that industry. Examples include the recent reshuttering of bars in all or parts of California, Florida and Texas.
Second all data in this report is SEASONALLY ADJUSTED; which sounds like a means to take seasonal factors into account when calculating its data, but ts really a practice by which they create long-run averages to compare current data to. Any deviation above the average is considered growth while any deviation below this average is considered a contraction. The downside to this is that it can misrepresent the actual situation. Say the economy’s been in a slump for a prolonged period and the average of jobs lost each month is -300,000. Then any number above -300,000, even if still negative at say -100,000, because it’s above the long-run average is still counted as a positive number with 200,000 jobs created in this scenario*.* While if the number were really -400,000 for a given month it would be ADJUSTED to a loss of merely -100,000. The same goes for positive numbers; with an average of +300,000 jobs a month any number above that, say +400,000, is ADJUSTED to show a positive 100,000, while anything below that is considered negative. For example +200,000 jobs a month is actually ADJUSTED TO A -100,000. The same sort of averaging also applies to the unemployment rate. So we can see how unreliable much of this data is.
Additionally this month the BLS reported that “[t]he household survey is generally collected through in-person and telephone interviews, but personal interviews were not conducted for the safety of interviewers and respondents. The household survey response rate, at 65 (-2 from May) percent, was about 18 percentage points lower than in months prior to the pandemic.” (June BLS Report pg.5) So the data that gives us the official unemployment rate, while flawed, is also quite incomplete.
Meanwhile“[a]s was the case in March, April, and May, household survey interviewers were instructed to classify employed persons absent from work due to temporary, coronavirus-related business closures as unemployed on temporary layoff. BLS and Census Bureau analyses of the underlying data suggest that this group still [did not] include . . . some workers affected by the pandemic who should have been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff.’
“If the workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to ‘other reasons’ (over and above the number absent for other reasons in a typical June) had been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate would have been about 1 percentage points higher than reported (on a not seasonally adjusted basis).” (June BLS Report pg. 5)
A better if still imperfect measure of the jobs situation can be found in a measure in the BLS report called the Employment-Population Ratio. This number, if still seasonally adjusted, tries to compare the actual number of people with a job to the entire working age population of the United States. Unfortunately it fails to take into account the number of say stay at home mothers, who actually are not in the labor force, but in our modern world this is such a rarity that statistically it shouldn’t impact the overall data too much. However neither does it take into account the number of retirees. This is easily corrected by finding what percent of the population is retired and subtracting it from the remaining number of people without a job. In this month’s BLS report the EMPLOYMENT-POPULATION RATIO IS A SEASONALLY ADJUSTED 54.6. THAT MEANS 45.4% OF PEOPLE 22 AND OLDER ARE WITHOUT A JOB. IF WE SUBTRACT THE ABOUT 14% OF THE POPULATION THAT RECEIVES SOCIALLY SECURITY WE GET A RATE OF JOBLESSNESS AT 31.4%.
Though this figure isn’t modified to count disabled adults who’d like to work, elder workers collecting Social Security but who still have to work, or people who really aren’t disabled but added to the Social Security rolls during the Great Recession to keep them out of the unemployment figures. WHEN WE CONSIDER ALL THESE PEOPLE THE ACTUAL REMAINDER FROM THE EMPLOYMENT-POPULATION RATIO IS PROBABLY NEARER 34.4. THAT IS TO SAY ABOUT 34% OF WORKING AGE AMERICANS ARE WITHOUT A JOB. This is a far cry from the 11.1% unemployment rate reported by the government.
Below is a link to this month’s employment report for any that are interested. www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf