Payroll employment edges up in September (+103,000); unemployment rate unchanged at 9.1%

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION -- SEPTEMBER 2011

Nonfarm payroll employment edged up by 103,000 in September, and the unemployment
rate held at 9.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The
increase in employment partially reflected the return to payrolls of about 45,000
telecommunications workers who had been on strike in August. In September, job gains
occurred in professional and business services, health care, and construction.
Government employment continued to trend down.

Household Survey Data

The number of unemployed persons, at 14.0 million, was essentially unchanged in
September, and the unemployment rate was 9.1 percent. Since April, the rate has held
in a narrow range from 9.0 to 9.2 percent. (See table A-1.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (8.8 percent),
adult women (8.1 percent), teenagers (24.6 percent), whites (8.0 percent), blacks
(16.0 percent), and Hispanics (11.3 percent) showed little or no change in September.
The jobless rate for Asians was 7.8 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1,
A-2, and A-3.)

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was 6.2
million in September. These individuals accounted for 44.6 percent of the unemployed.
(See table A-12.)

Read more: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

---

Monthly Employment Reports

The large print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.

A Du'er pointed out a few months back that, if I'm going to post the link to the press release, I should include the link to all the tables that provide additional ways of examining the data. Specifically, I should post a link to "Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization." Table A-15 includes those who are not considered unemployed, on the grounds that they have become discouraged about the prospects of finding a job and have given up looking. Here are those links.

Employment Situation

Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization

From the February 10, 2011, "DOL Newsletter":

Take Three

Secretary Solis answers three questions about how the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates unemployment rates.

How does BLS determine the unemployment rate and the number of jobs that were added each month?

BLS uses two different surveys to get these numbers. The "household survey," or Current Population Survey (CPS), involves asking people, from about 60,000 households, a series of questions to assess each person in the household's activities including work and searching for work. Their responses give us the unemployment rate. The "establishment survey," or Current Employment Statistics (CES), surveys 140,000 employers about how many people they have on their payrolls. These results determine the number of jobs being added or lost.

[Roland99]

1. Still 50k-60k below break-even point.

good...but needs to be much better.

[alp227]

24. had governments decided against austerity growth would be closer to break-even

that would protect the demand portion too. I've heard of a study about how states that cut taxes/budget suffered more unemployment.

[Roland99]

2. Came across this, too. 45k were from telecom workers returning from strike?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/september-nfp-prints-103000-beats-consensus-even-u-6-comes-highest-december-2010-manufacturing-

[Moosepoop]

3. It's in the first paragraph of the OP. n/t

[Beacool]

4. Not much improvement if 45,000 were striking workers going back to work.

:(

[pinqy]

5. Why not?

Would you also not count them as being unemployed while on strike?

[stockholmer]

6. not if they didnt apply for unemployment benefits

[pinqy]

8. The unemployment rate is NOT based on unemployment insurance

It doesn't matter if they collected, applied, or were eligible, they'd still be counted as unemployed.

The Unemployment rate has NEVER been based on benefits.

[stockholmer]

14. I never said it was, BUT all the time on here, people post the first time UE claims reports as a

surrogate for UE.

The US government and so many who stand to gain from a falsely-skewed positive mish-mash of statistics are guilty of manipulating the numbers in many fashions to serve whatever agenda they have.

[Beacool]

10. Because those are not new jobs that were produced.

They are people who already had a job, but were on strike.

;-)

[pinqy]

12. How were they counted the previous month?

As unemployed because they were on strike. Would you not have counted them as unemployed?

Month 0, 100 ppl employed
Month 1, 40 go on strike, employment now = 60 That is a loss.
Month 2, the strikers come back, employment now 100. That is a gain from Month 1.

It looks like you'd either ignore that the strikers weren't working, or count them as a loss, but not a gain.

[Synicus Maximus]

13. That is true as far as unemployment goes. But no new jobs were

created. If there are 100 jobs and 40 people go on strike the jobs still exist, when the strike is over you still have 100 jobs.

[pinqy]

15. No the jobs don't exist

The establishments report the number of people employed. If they're on strike, they're not employed so the jobs would be "lost."

[Beacool]

17. The whole point is that those 45,000 jobs were not newly created.

They already existed. Therefore, out of the 103,000 jobs, 45,000 need to be taken out of the final count. So the real non-farm private sector newly created jobs count is only 58,000.

:shrug:

[pinqy]

19. You'd have to add them back into the previous month then

July employment was 131,174,000
August employment was 131,231,000....a gain of 57,000. BUT THAT INCLUDES DEDUCTING THE 47,000 STRIKERS.
without the strike, it would have been 131,278,000...a gain of 104,000.
September employment was 131,334,000, a gain of 103,000, including +47,000 from the returning strikers.
Total change from July to Septemper was 160,000

Ok, so let's look at how things would be if the strikers hadn't gone on strike
July would still have been 131,174,000
August would have been 131,278,000 a gain of 104,000
September would still have been 131,334,000 for a gain of 56,000
BUT the change from JULY would still be 160,000

But by what you're doing, the July to August change includes the negative of the strikers, but you're keeping them out. Which makes no sense. If the jobs still existed, then they shouldn't have been subtracted from the August numbers.

[Le Taz Hot]

7. Does anyone know the unemployment figures

that would include people who have run out of unemployment and still are unemployed? There's virtually no increase in jobs, unemployment remains the same, but as time goes on, more and more people are going to exhaust their benefits. I would think that, beyond those currently collecting unemployment and including the under-employed and those running out of benefits would reflect the REAL unemployment rate which would be MUCH higher than 9.1%.

[pinqy]

9. 9.1%

The UE rate is not and never has been based on UI benefits. So it includes those who have run out, never applied, were never eligible, never had a job.

Underemployed is still employed so it's ridiculous to say they're "really unemployed."

[stockholmer]

16. U6 (broader base, including underemployed,) went up from 16.2% to 16.5%, the REAL rate is over 20%

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/10/07/unemployments-here-to-stay/

Do not let people try to fool you or get you deep into the weeds with rhetoric and massaged stats, the unemployemnt rate is NOT getting better, and millions who have given up looking for a job are simply not counted in the roles, especially the U3 number (9.1%). Workforce participation levels are at the lowest they have been in over 50 years. Though some of this is due to students (who would have never in the past gone to uni) going off to or staying in college due to lack of jobs, even this is bad, as these students are racking up tens of billions in new debt that they will have an extremely hard time paying off.


The U6 unemployment rate counts not only people without work seeking full-time employment (the more familiar U-3 rate), but also counts "marginally attached workers and those working part-time for economic reasons." Note that some of these part-time workers counted as employed by U-3 could be working as little as an hour a week. And the "marginally attached workers" include those who have gotten discouraged and stopped looking, but still want to work. The age considered for this calculation is 16 years and over,

•U1 : Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer.
•U2 : Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work.
•U3 : Official unemployment rate per ILO definition.
•U4 : U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.
•U5 : U4 + other "marginally attached workers", or "loosely attached workers", or those who "would like" and are able to work, but have not looked for work recently.
•U6 : U5 + Part time workers who want to work full time, but cannot due to economic reasons.

----------------------------------------

If a worker has not looked for a job in 12 months or longer (verified by contact with a government office), they are NOT counted in any of the above metrics. There are millions of these people in the US. Also, if a person works part-time, but needs full time work, they are not technically 'unemployed' but are definitely not in a good economic position.



There is much, much disinfo out there. Here are some good sources dealing with this:

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-charts


The seasonally-adjusted SGS Alternate Unemployment Rate reflects current unemployment reporting methodology adjusted for SGS-estimated long-term discouraged workers, who were defined out of official existence in 1994. That estimate is added to the BLS estimate of U-6 unemployment, which includes short-term discouraged workers.

The U-3 unemployment rate is the monthly headline number. The U-6 unemployment rate is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) broadest unemployment measure, including short-term discouraged and other marginally-attached workers as well as those forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time employment.



------------------------------------------------------------
Verizon strikers and UE

http://www.suitablyflip.com/suitably_flip/2011/10/on-that-good-jobs-number.html

So while the updated data are better across the board than the unrevised prior months' numbers and the September consensus (red vs. blue lines below), normalizing August and September for the strike (green line) paints a different picture. It not only shows September job growth slightly below expectations, but it betrays a much uglier trend - not a rebound, but a swift and steady decline in job growth in recent months.

graph:

http://www.suitablyflip.com/.a/6a00d8341c572653ef014e8c170198970d-800wi

[Beacool]

18. Exactly, the unemployment figures are not getting better.

Neither is job creation. A mere 58,000 new jobs were created (taking out the 45,000 telecommunication employees who were on strike and went back to work).

That's a paltry sum for a nation of 300M people.

Thanks for looking it up.

:(

[pinqy]

20. Why do you fail to mention that U-4 stayed the same and U-5 went down?

Discouraged workers went slightly up (though not enough to move the U-4) but all Marginally Attached went down and the U-5 went down.

As for shadowstats BS....you have to add about 12 million people to the U-6 to get his numbers. Which is ridiculous.

[stockholmer]

21. no,you only have to add 6 to 7 million, not 12, to the U6, to get in the Shadowstats

range. IMHO, they are much more close to spot on that the cooked-books BLS data. Plus U6 going up with a near constant U4 and U5 only means that you are just adding some part-time workers. The US minimum wage is already laughable low, and making 7 or 8 dollars an hour for 5 to 25 hours a week is a cruel joke.

A nation with millions of 40 to 200 dollar a week McDonalds burger-flippers and Walmart drones is not a healthy system.

[pinqy]

22. Williams hasn't posted his Sept figures yet

So let's look at August.
Labor Force (L) = 153,594,000 (Labor Force is Employed + Unemployed)
Unemployed (U)= 13,967,000
Discouraged (D) = 977,000
All Marginally Attached (M)= 2,575,000 (includes the discouraged)
Part time for economic reasons (P)= 8,826,000

So the official U-3 was U/L = 13,967,000/153,594,000 = 9.1%

Adding in the discouraged, we have to add them to both the numerator and the denominator, so U-4 was (U+D)/(L+D) = (13,967,000 + 977,000)/(153,594,000 + 977,000) = 9.7%

For the U-5, since Discouraged are part of Marginally Attached, we sub M for D and U-5 was (U+M)/(L+M) = (13,967,000 + 2,575,000)/(153,594,000 + 2,575,000) = 10.6%

For the U-6, we add in Part Time for economic reasons to the numerator only, because they are already counted in the denominator as part of the Labor Force (employed). So the U-6 was (U+M+P)/(L+M) = U+M)/(L+M) = (13,967,000 + 2,575,000 + 8,826,000)/(153,594,000 + 2,575,000) = 16.2%

And Williams claimed his shadowstats number was 22.8% The people he's allegedly adding are not already in the equation, so have to be added to the numerator and the denominator. Using X for the shadowstats new additions, the SGS would be (U+M+P+X)/(L+M+X) = 22.8%
Doing the math: ((13,967,000 + 2,575,000 + 8,826,000 + X)/(153,594,000 + 2,575,000 + X) = 0.228
(25,368,000 + X)/(156,169,000 + X) = 0.228
(25,368,000 + X) = 0.228*(156,169,000 + X)
(25,368,000 + X) = 35,607,000 + .228X
.772X = 10,239,000
X = 10,239,000/.772
X= 13,262,000

Now....BLS also asks if people "want a job now" regardless of availability or job search, etc. That number for Aug was 6,493,000 and that includes the 2,575,000 Marginally Attached. So he added 3.3 times as many people as those who even wanted a job and weren't already included in the U-6.

Where on earth is he getting his numbers from?

[pinqy]

25. Looking at the shadowstats Sep number of 23.1%

That makes it 13.5million more than the U-6

[bhikkhu]

11. 19th month of positive numbers for the private sector, I believe!

Growth is always insufficient, but growth is a much better thing than decline.

As far as "the small numbers taketh away", yes they do...declines in public sector employment have been a huge drag on the overall health of the economy. Essentially, we have lost hundreds of thousands of good college-grad career-type jobs, due to government revenue policies that begin and end with the repugs "starve the beast" approach to government.

[murphyj87]

23. Full time employment up in September (+65,000); unemployment rate down to 7.1%

In Canada, full time employment is up in September (+65,000 - over 5 times that of the US per capita) and unemployment rate for September down to 7.1%