A Just-Good Employment Report, with AJSN Showing Latent Demand for 17.1 Million Jobs

This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary was to have two features: Estimated new nonfarm payroll positions up from 170,000 to 175,000, and many annual data adjustments muddying comparisons with December and other recent months. 

We got the second, but not quite the first.  Jobs as above missed the mark with 143,000.  However, almost all the other results were favorable.  Seasonally adjusted unemployment ticked down 0.1% to 4.0%, with the unadjusted variety up seasonally from 3.8% to 4.4%.  The adjusted number of unemployed lost 100,000 to 6.8 million, with the count of long-term jobless, looking for 27 weeks or longer, down 200,000, on top of last month’s 100,000 improvement, to 1.4 million.  The two best measures of closeness to working, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, each added 0.1% to reach 62.6% and 60.1%.  Those employed part-time for economic reasons, or keeping such jobs while thus far unsuccessfully looking for full-time ones, gained 100,000 to 4.5 million.  Average hourly private nonfarm payroll wages rose 18 cents, or more than double recent inflation, reaching $35.87. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the metric showing how many additional positions could be quickly filled if all knew they would be easy to get, was up 900,000, mostly seasonally, as follows:

The largest change from last month was from official unemployment, as the AJSN is not seasonally adjusted, which added almost exactly the amount that it increased overall.  There were gains from those wanting work but discouraged, like-thinking people not searching for it in the past year, and those only temporarily unavailable.  All of these were more than offset by the count of those in the armed services, in institutions, and off the grid catching up with last time’s jump in the Census Bureau population estimate, as that component reflects the difference between American population aged 15 and over and those in all other categories.  The share of the AJSN from those officially unemployed was 39.3%, 3.4% higher than in December.

Compared with a year before, the AJSN was almost unchanged, with higher contributions from those unemployed, discouraged, and not wanting work cancelled by fewer not searching for a year or more and a large decrease in the assessed number of American expatriates.

How did the adjustments affect this week’s data?  Befitting the change in population with which they had previously been synchronized, almost everything grew.  The employment numbers and percentages changed in inconsistent ways from the previous month, but still seem to have improved.  I don’t know if, with the stated counts of those not in the labor force increasing by about 1 million and 800,000 more not interested, that many people gave up on job searches, but, clearly, many did.  So once again we need to factor down the positive outcomes, which brings the report down from excellent to just positive.  On that, the turtle took a step forward, but only a moderate one.