by dakine01
January Jobs Report(s) Part II
8:20 am in Economy, Financial Crisis, Jobs, Unemployment by dakine01
graphic: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr
The official Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics employment numbers for January 2011 are out and guess what? Same shit, different day.
According to the report (via Reuters) the jobs increase for January 2011 is 36K. This is compared to Wednesday’s report from ADP (from my post on Wednesday), that the private sector created 187K jobs in January. Since the BLS number includes public sector as well as private sector, it looks like governments at all levels shed approximately 150K jobs. The same thing as happened last month, where the number of private sector jobs was initially reported as 297K (later downgraded to 247K) while the overall number from BLS was 103K.
Of course, what will be reported heavily is that the “unemployment rate” has “dropped” to 9% from 9.4%:
There was some good news in the employment report as the jobless rate fell to 9 percent from 9.4 percent in December. The household survey from which the unemployment rate is derived showed the number of unemployed dropped by about 600,000 last month.
The unemployment rate had previously declined largely as a result of people giving up the search for work, but in January the labor force was unchanged, even after adjustments for updated population controls.
The reality appears to me to be that all the numbers are probably fudged and no one in any position to do anything or comment on it has a clue. As I said, same shit, different day. . . . Read the rest of this entry →
