This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary wasn’t the important one – that will be next month, when it will have had time to absorb the current governmental chaos. But it still gives a good look at how employment was doing before the effects of the back-and-forth tariffs and employment cuts impacted the data.
We added
151,000 net new nonfarm payroll positions, only a bit short of the 160,000 and
170,000 estimates. Seasonally adjusted
and unadjusted unemployment each gained 0.1% to come in at 4.1% and 4.5%. The other numbers tracked here got
worse: the adjusted count of unemployed gained
300,000 to 7.1 million, those out for 27 weeks or longer increased 100,000 to
1.5 million, the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation
rate each sank 0.2% to 59.9% and 62.4%, and those working part-time for
economic reasons, or keeping such jobs while thus far unsuccessfully seeking
full-time ones, lurched up 400,000 – is there a story there? – to 4.9
million. Average private nonfarm hourly payroll
wages rose 6 cents, less than inflation, reaching $35.93.
The American
Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the measure showing how many new positions could
be quickly filled if all knew they would be easy to get, sat in nearly the same
place, gaining 27,000, as follows:
The most-changed
contribution to the AJSN was from those discouraged, adding 150,000 less, almost
offset by more people unemployed and more reporting they wanted work but did
not look for it over the past year. The
share of the AJSN from those unemployed was up 0.5% to 39.8%. Over the previous year, the AJSN rose less
than 100,000, with a large boost in those officially jobless more than equalized
by a smaller number of American expatriates.
What does all
this add up to? The number of those out
of the labor force decreased 140,000, and those not interested fell 300,000,
meaning that there was no great worker-pool inflow or outflow from existing
people. While the overall tone of the
report was down, we can’t take those 151,000 new opportunities for
granted. Accordingly, the turtle didn’t
go forward, but didn’t backtrack either.
