February’s Employment Data: Little Change Compared with December, But AJSN Now 16.5 Million on Higher Latent Demand

This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was special.  Not that there was anything noteworthy about the numbers – they were duller than usual – but now that the government has been staying entirely open, they show us clearer than last month’s fractured issue what has been happening this year.

First was the quite low 20,000 net new nonfarm payroll positions, which wasn’t so bad when averaged with January’s 304,000, or 162,000 per month, not great but still more than needed for our population increase.  Seasonally adjusted unemployment fell 0.2% to 3.8%, but with January’s 0.1% gain we have no trend.  Likewise for average hourly nonfarm payroll earnings, which stalled at plus only 2 cents per hour last time but rose 11 cents last month to $27.66 for a hair-over-inflation average 6.5 cents per hour.  The count of those officially jobless and out for 27 weeks or longer again held at 1.3 million, with the total unemployed number, down 300,000 to 6.2 million, more than erasing January’s 200,000 gain for an average drop of 50,000.  The two best measures of how common it is for Americans to be working, the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate, held even, the same result for the first and a hold of January’s 0.1% improvement for the second.

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the metric which shows how many more positions could be easily filled if all knew they were truly easy to get, dropped 600,000 from January for an average 335,000 rise over the past two months, as follows:

Compared with December, most of the gain came from higher official unemployment, with other significant contributions from increases in those not searching for work in the previous year, those in the miscellaneous non-civilian et al. category, and people claiming discouragement.  Compared with a year ago the AJSN has improved by 300,000, with a 419,400 drop in latent demand from those officially unemployed partially offset by a 155,000 hike from those wanting to work but not looking for it for a year or longer.  Perhaps tellingly given improving economic times, 325,000 fewer people are in the miscellaneous group than a year ago, cutting hidden demand there by a tenth of that.

How can we sum up all of this?  It was a decent two months, with small surprises in the part-time-for-economic-reasons (good) and number of new positions (bad).  We are showing signs of leveling off, with year-over-year AJSN improvement wafting down, but we remain in the best economy since 2008.  And we’re still, slowly, getting better.  Accordingly, while it wasn’t large even for his species, the turtle, once again, took a step forward.