About those employment figures….

At first glance, the news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is very good indeed:

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 288,000, and the unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 6.3 percent in April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment gains were widespread, led by job growth in professional and business services, retail trade, food services and drinking places, and construction.

So far, so good, right?

Well, not quite.

For starters, the cited paragraph cites two different surveys. The employment survey produced the job figure (288K), while the household survey gave us the unemployment rate. The problem is that the household survey also produces job figures, and they showed that the number of working Americans fell last month. The drop in unemployment was entirely due to nearly one million people leaving the labor force.

Of course, the employment survey is supposed to be more accurate on job creation (at least that’s what the Administration and its allies will claim), so I thought it might be a good idea to take a more granular look at it, to see where the new jobs were…and suddenly there was less to this job spurt than met the eye.

The cited paragraph itself begins the tale: two of the top job producers (retail and food/drink) are part-time heavy. Construction, meanwhile, can be fleeting (although it looks evenly spread – meaning this is not a housing bubble). Finally, nearly a third of the “professional and business services” boost comes from – temporary help.

This is one area where the household survey is in accord: while it had employment overall fall by about 73,000, part-time workers were up by 54,000.

To be fair, part-time work beats no work at all, but these reports still point to a recovery that is far weaker than it should be, and nowhere near leading America to the prosperity it expects and deserves.

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