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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Gallup's Job Creation Index was +37 in May, tied with the record high found in March. This marks 15 straight months of the index reaching +30 or higher. The index has generally been moving upward since bottoming out at -5 in April 2009 during the Great Recession. It has been in positive territory since February 2010. Gallup's Job Creation Index is based on employed U.S. adults' reports of whether their employer is hiring workers and expanding the size of its workforce, or letting people go and reducing the size of its workforce. Gallup computes the index by...

So, yesterday ADP releases it's job numbers, 253,000 new jobs vs 185,000 estimated.And everybody here at FR is whooping and hollering. Then the BLS numbers are released today and their numbers are WAAAAAY down.138,000 according to BLS.Almost 50,000 BELOW what was expected.So, what is right and what is wrong?How can ADP be almost twice of BLS?The Atlanta Fed projected the Q2 GDP growth at a 4% pace.That suggests the economy is on a tear.Does anybody know the reality of the labor situation?And can you explain it for the rest of us?

Back when Hong Kong was a largely autonomous colony of Great Britain, its leaders made a point to not calculate the city-state’s economic statistics. With good reason. The feeling was that if government were in the business of divining unemployment, GDP, and other supposed measures of economic activity, that those same measures would be used by politicians as an excuse for politicians to ‘do something.’ Of course, when it comes to economic growth and progress, there’s no need for politicians to do anything other than ensure individual freedom to succeed, fail, import, export, and to generally produce in order to...

There's something weird going on with the US economy. It's steadily adding new jobs, at a pace of about 185,000 every month. Unemployment keeps falling: at 4.4%, it's at its lowest since May, 2007. But people's wages aren't growing at the rate you'd expect them to when unemployment is this low and hiring is so healthy. So what's happening? One explanation is there's a larger pool of people who are starting to look for work — people who weren't previously considered unemployed. If that's the case, companies don't need to boost wages to compete for workers, because there's more people...

The upsurge in economic activity that has followed from Donald Trump's elevation to the presidency has an unpublicized "dark side" according to a recent newscast from CBS. Network correspondent Norah O'Donnell explained that "what the Trump Administration failed to consider was that getting people off unemployment and welfare and into the workforce means more will be on the roads driving to their jobs. This exposes them to higher risk of death and injury in traffic crashes." "Worse, the risk isn't confined to the work commute," O'Donnell breathlessly told viewers. "When people are more prosperous they also travel more for recreation....

The Class of 2017 is facing the strongest labor market in nearly 10 years. According to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Rockefeller Foundation, the unemployment rate for recent graduates is at its lowest rate since October 2008. This has led some to suggest that this nation has finally emerged from the ravages of the Great Recession. However, this may be a matter of perspective. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2016 Household Data Annual Averages, African-Americans with some college but no degree have the same unemployment rate as whites with no high school...

Academics are always mystified that the American public perceives reality differently than they do. It never occurs to the former that the latter may be closer to it. The American Council on Education (ACE) polled its members at the ACE annual convention on a quartet of questions. "Not surprisingly, most of those at the meeting who took the poll answered, correctly, that the economic value of college is increasing; that half of borrowers indeed owe less than $13,000; that most institutions do try hard to manage costs and limit tuition increases; and that traditional colleges and universities are nonprofit institutions,"...

(Editors Note, this commentary was co-authored with Matthew Howe) On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of our Nation’s greatest speeches, the Gettysburg Address. The purpose was to dedicate the Soldier’s National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of a battle fought that year in July that turned the tide of the Civil War. President Lincoln was not the primary speaker for the event, but his words are everlasting. His closing words of a speech that was less than 270 words are very appropriate for today. This is what President Lincoln said, “It is rather for us to...

Total continuing claims for unemployment benefits ran at the lowest level in 28 years at the beginning of May, the Department of Labor reported Thursday morning in a new sign that the jobs market is still improving. The total number of unemployed workers receiving benefits fell to 1.9 million, the agency said, the lowest such mark since November of 1988, when the workforce was much smaller. Over the past month, the average number of continuing claims per week has clocked in at 1.95 million, the lowest number in 43 years.

Welcome back to the status quo ante. After an unexpectedly poor March, the US economy returned to its previous pace of job creation, adding 211,000 jobs in April according to today’s jobs report. However, nearly as many people left the workforce last month as got jobs within it. In fact, March turned out to be worse than previously reported: The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for February was revised up from +219,000 to +232,000, and the change for March was revised down from +98,000 to +79,000. With these revisions, employment gains in February and March combined were 6,000 lower...

New applications for unemployment insurance rose to 244,00 in the second week of April, the Department of Labor reported Thursday, up from an ultra-low 234,000 the week before. Investors had expected jobless claims to rebound to around 242,000 after falling to the second-lowest level since 1973 in the previous week. Thanks in part to new claims running low for so long, the total number of people receiving benefits of all durations fell to the lowest level in 17 years. Just 1.98 million people received benefits in the first week of April, according to Thursday's report, the lowest such number since...

The unemployment rate declined to 4.5 percent in March, and total nonfarm payroll employment edged up by 98,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate on Tuesday sent President Donald Trump a measure to expand the number of applicants for jobless benefits who can be drug-tested. The White House has said Trump will sign the measure into law as a cancellation of "unnecessary regulations." Lawmakers in the GOP-controlled Congress have complained that under President Barack Obama, the government placed too many limits on states for deciding which unemployment applicants can be drug-tested. The Labor Department's regulation meant that states could only test applicants for unemployment benefits who do jobs that require drug testing. The resolution passed by the House and...

It appears that the "animal spirits" unleashed by President Trump are not contained to the stock market: according to the BLS, one of the most notable observations to emerge from the February (and January) jobs reports is that the number of Americans no longer in the labor force plunged since December, declining by 736,000 in January (to a modest extent due to a data revision) and a further 176,000 in February to 94,190K. The combined two-month addition of 912,000 was the biggest drop in the "not in labor force" series on record. ... The 94,19 million people who are considered...

The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell to near a 44-year low last week, pointing to further tightening of the labor market even as economic growth appears to have remained moderate in the first quarter.

Asylum seeker unemployment numbers are up 33 percent in Austria despite the fact that the number of total migrants coming into the country has declined. The number of unemployed asylum seekers has risen to 28,720 in Austria, and the capital Vienna is home to the vast majority of the unemployed migrants with two-thirds of asylum seekers in the city being without work. According to the Vienna employment Service (AMS), 67 percent registered with them to find work while many others were simply not available to work Kronen Zeitung reports.

As the Trump administration continues to figure out ways to put people back to work, they have to deal with a simple demographic fact: there are tens of millions of American men, in the prime years of their working lives, who have dropped out of the labor force. It’s not that these men are trying, and failing, to get jobs. They’ve simply given up. What is causing this problem and what can be done about it? Nicholas Eberstadt explores this issue in "Men Without Work: The Invisible Crisis." Eberstadt is a long-time fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and one...

<p>They’re looking for work, out of the labor force but unhappy about it, or report working part-time when they’d prefer more hours, according to data released last week. Their plight comes even as the U.S. flirts with what economists consider the maximum level of employment for the first time since before the recession, having added 15.8 million jobs since the start of 2010. While some of America’s jobless are simply between gigs, those persistently stuck out of work are called the structurally unemployed.</p>

U.S. employers stepped up hiring last month, adding a healthy 227,000 jobs, and more Americans began looking for work, a sign that President Donald Trump has inherited a robust job market. January's job growth was the best since September, and it exceeded last year's average monthly gain of 187,000, the Labor Department said Friday . The unemployment rate ticked up to a still-low 4.8 percent from 4.7 percent in December. But the rate rose for an encouraging reason: More Americans started looking for work, though not all of them found jobs immediately. The proportion of adults who are either working...

While Trump has personally expressed skepticism about the validity of the payrolls report, and especially the seasonally adjusted Establishment Survey, one aspect of the jos report he has been especially focused on is the number of people who are out of the labor force for economic reasons or otherwise: this is the infamous 95 million number that he brings up every time the strength of the "Obama recovery" has been mentioned. Which is why we are confident Trump will be happy to learn that in January, while the US economy added some 227K jobs according to the Establishment Survey,...