The Jobs Report Dips from Great to Good – AJSN Reflects Only Half of Its Seasonally Lower Latent Demand

This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary may have seemed disappointing, as for once the number of net new nonfarm payroll positions fell short of public estimates.  But that was not the real reason.  The ones I saw for April, the month of the report, ranged from 223,000 to 250,000 – it came in at 175,000.  Otherwise, seasonally adjusted unemployment was up 0.1% to 3.9% and the unadjusted version was down, as is typical from March to April, 0.4% to 3.5%.  Unadjusted employment rose 234,000 to 161,590,000, with such unemployed down more than 700,000 to 5,894,000.  There were 95,080,000 people claiming no interest in work, up 266,000.  The counts of people jobless for 12 months or more and those working part-time for economic reasons, or keeping those arrangements while looking thus far unsuccessfully for full-time ones, both worsened, up from 1.2 million to 1.3 million and from 4.3 million to 4.5 million.  The two measures showing how common it is for Americans to be working or that plus those counted as jobless, the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate, were narrowly mixed, with the former down 0.1% to 60.2% and the latter holding at 62.7%.  Private nonfarm payroll hourly earnings increased 6 cents to $34.75, not keeping up with inflation.

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the metric showing how many additional positions could be quickly filled if all knew that getting one would be little more than another daily errand, improved with a 300,000 drop from March as follows:

The number of unemployed shaved over 600,000, but increases in those discouraged and those not looking for a year or more offset more than half of that.  The share of the AJSN from those officially jobless fell to 33.1%, meaning that more than two-thirds of people taking these opportunities and not working now would have other statuses.  Compared with a year before, the AJSN gained about 650,000, more than that from a higher number of unemployed.

We have areas of concern here.  Although the number of new jobs keeps on exceeding our population increases, joblessness is at the top of its nine-month range, with several other statistics worse than in March.  If they degrade again, we may need to accept that we are not in the top employment category anymore.  In the meantime, though, the turtle took a small step forward.