If you were looking for an exciting Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary this morning, you didn’t get one. So I will parse what we got for you.
Instead of
double the predicted number of net new nonfarm payroll positions, we got half,
57,000 instead of a published 110,000 estimate.
Otherwise, most of the numbers were not disappointing. Seasonally adjusted unemployment lost 0.1% to
reach 4.2%, and the unadjusted variety stayed at 4.4%. Measured adjustedly, the number of unemployed
fell 200,000 to 7.1 million. There were
100,000 fewer long-term jobless, out for 27 weeks or longer. Those working part-time for economic reasons,
or keeping such positions while looking unsuccessfully for full-time ones, also
lost 100,000, to 4.7 million. Average
hourly private nonfarm payroll wages rose 11 cents, again close to inflation,
to $37.64. Two outcomes worsening were
the two showing Americans’ connection to work, the labor force participation
rate and the employment-population ratio, off 0.3% to 61.5% and down 0.2% to
59.0% respectively.
The American
Job Shortage Number or AJSN, which shows how many additional positions could be
quickly filled if all knew they would be easy and routine to get, gained 310,000
to the following:
The largest shifts
came from the count of those officially jobless, pushing the AJSN up 515,000,
and those wanting work but not looking for it for the past year, moving it down
239,000 - no others were more than 55,000 either way. Of the AJSN, 38.5% was from those employed,
up 2.3% from last month. Compared with a
year before, the AJSN was almost unchanged, losing 52,000, with its largest
input differences from those discouraged, down 139,000, and those saying they
did not want a job, up 136,000.
How, overall,
did we do? When taking the outcomes above,
that those not in the labor force decreased almost 300,000, and remembering
that fewer people work in June than in May, we did well. It wasn’t huge, but it was positive and broad-based. We cannot get discouraged about missing
projections, as those do not affect anything except our perceptions. The turtle took a small step forward.
