Media Employment Report Cover-up: 150,000 New Jobs Added August

Nice post.

We always have a jump in unemployment figures this time of year when college students quit their summer jobs and go back to the classroom. Media is ignoring this element of the story.

Three points here:

The unemployment rate is determined by what the Labor Dept. calls the Household Survey.

Senator Roberts is holding hearings with the Labor Department to determine why the two surveys differ. Should be interesting.

We have anywhere from 9 to 15 million illegal aliens in the country, most of them working. Are they counted? Are they taking jobs away from Americans, thereby keeping the unemployment rate higher?

As for those who have "given up looking for work", just who in the hell are they? If I was the sole support for my family and I was out of work, I would never give up looking for a job. Who are these people?

There is so much internal sabotage in the government going on nowadays it's unbelieveable. The whole stinking government is filled with leftists and they are skewing every report they can. How about the EPA report about air quailty after 9/11 in New York ? Problem is they are union and you can't get rid of them unless they die.

I refuse to practice the terrible economy mantra.

The left will spin the economy until the election.

Most people I meet who complain (generally) about the economy are still crying that their 401K plan is down from its 1990's zenith. They are employed and very comfortable.

Well, obviously they're not the sole support for households.

But there are many people are available to work if jobs are easy to find and wages are high. Housewives, students, and the retired will come forward if the price is right.

You will notice that Newsmax does not cite stories from reliably conservative media like the Wall Street Journal and FoxNews, which reported the unemployment story the same way as the NY Times, Washington Post, etc. That's because, despite Newsmax's attempted sleight of hand by selectively lifting pieces from the stories, the media got the story right.

Perhaps the greatest indicator of Newsmax's false spin is the allegation that the NY Times "bizarrely" claimed that the divergent statistics were due to a surge in the number of people who, having lost their jobs, listed themselves as self employed rather than unemployed. The Times article notes that that information comes directly from the Labor Department survey that Newsmax wants us to believe has rosy news on the unemployment front:
"The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics determines the unemployment rate through a monthly survey of 60,000 households. If respondents say they were unemployed in the week before the survey, they are asked if they are actively looking for work. Only those actively searching for a job are counted as unemployed. Those who say they would like a job but are too discouraged by the difficulties of finding one to search actively are no longer counted as either employed or unemployed."

While Newsmax trashes the media for using "unnamed" economists, you will notice that Newsmax itself quotes not a single economist in its own story.

Hey, just try to find a carpenter, plumber or electrician... everybody is too busy.

While Newsmax trashes the media for using "unnamed" economists, you will notice that Newsmax itself quotes not a single economist in its own story

But, but, but Rush Limbaugh says it is true too.

If this is true, let's string up Willy G. Heck, let's string up Willy G. even if it's not true.

Senator Roberts is holding hearings with the Labor Department to determine why the two surveys differ.

Guess NewsMax isn't the only one suspicious of those unemployment #'s.

I was wondering if that had something to do with it. Thank you for clarifying that.

Clinton Administration Lost 3.9 Million Jobs

by Staff Government Writers, The Daily Republican Newspaper

SACRAMENTO DESK - The nation's economy is sluggish with jobs and productivity in a steady state of long-term decline according to the Clinton administration's labor department report released Thursday.

John Taylor, a Stanford University economist and a chief Dole economic adviser said "The job-loss rate is high for this stage of a recovery. It is hard to see any of the improvement that the [Clinton] administration claims. Job insecurity is still widespread."

The labor department reported Thursday that a total of 8.4 million people were pushed out of their jobs involuntarily from 1993 through 1995. That represented one out of every 14 job holders, compared with one out of 12 in the early 1990s.

Of those Americans who have lost their jobs since Clinton was elected in 1992, only 33 percent found work but have not earned as much or more than they had before.

"You still have many layoffs," said Thomas Nardone, a supervising economist at the labor department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, "and if you lose your job, most people don't end up in situations that are as good in terms of earnings as the jobs they lost."

The labor department survey shows a work force still suffering from job downsizing and wage stagnation. However, the Clinton administration cited the survey as evidence that "times are better."

There have been 8.4 million jobs eliminated in the Clinton administration's economy. That represents a decline of 16 percent from the 9 million lost in the three years ending in 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated. The earlier years were mostly a time of recession and sluggish economic growth, they thought.

"Basically we are living in a situation in which public mood is that jobs are at risk," said Henry Farber, a Princeton University labor economist.

The labor department data released Thursday revealed that from the time Clinton took office in 1993 through 1995 the jobs of about 7.2 percent of the work force were eliminated.

The New York Times, in a series of articles on downsizing in March, combined the government's job displacement data into a single set of figures that reconciled overlapping numbers from different surveys. Using this data, The Times estimated that a total of 43.5 million job losses occurred from 1979 through 1995.

That series included projections for the years 1994 and 1995 that showed a modest decline in the number of jobs lost. Substituting the actual data for the projections produced a total of 43.3 million jobs lost for the 17-year period.

An article in The New Yorker quoted the White House's chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, as saying that The Times' projections for 1994 and 1995 should be taken "with a grain of salt."

A major point of The Times series was that the level of job loss had remained higher than in past economic recoveries.

White-collar workers represented 52 percent of those who lost jobs and blue-collar workers 35 percent, much different from the early 1980s, when layoffs were largely a blue-collar phenomenon. Men still edged-out women, 56 percent to 44 percent, but women were up two percentage points from the early 1990s, while men slipped by the same amount.

People in their prime working years, 25 to 54, still represented the overwhelming majority of those laid-off: 78 percent, up a tiny percentage point from the early 1990s.

The survey, covering 50,000 representative households, found hat 73 percent of those who lost their jobs from 1993 through 1995 ere employed again when the survey was done last February, compared with 68 percent in the early 1990s. Only 9.8 percent consider themselves as job-hunting and unemployed, down from 13.1 per cent in the earlier period.

Of the 3.9 million people who lost full-time jobs under the Clinton administration's economic policies in the 1993-1994 period, 33 percent had landed new full-time jobs by last February that paid as much as or more than the ones they had lost, the report found. That was up slightly from 31 percent in the early 1990s.

claims of job losses were based on a separate survey of business payrolls, which is normally not part of the Labor Department's monthly unemployment report:

False. Both business and household surveys are part of every months "payrolls" report, the BLS actually names it's report "THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: - month year"

The surveys are different.

Businesses surveyed said (net) 93,000 postions were removed from payrolls which would no longer be filled or recruited. That's 93,000 fewer opportunities for the unemployed to find work.

However, the household survey (for August 2003) says that unemployment shrank by 157,000 (ie jobs still on payrolls were filled) and the civilian labor force shrank by 10,000 and therefore concluding 147,000 found work.

A further discussion can ensue about whether those 147,000 found good work or are "flipping burgers"

A person without a job who finds work is not "creating" a job. They're only going from unemployed to employed, but the job they filled previously existed. If that job had been eliminated, it would have appeared as a stat on the Payrolls report as 93,001st job eliminated.

There are three different stats (actually more) relating to work:

payrolls - reports the increase or decrease in the number of jobs that employers are willing to pay for.
employment - the number of people who are working in some capacity
unemployment - the number of people who would like to work but haven't found a job.

misleading reports claiming that the number of jobs held by Americans declined by nearly 100,000 in August.

Here is the misleading misunderstanding - "jobs held by Americans".

If it read "jobs available to Americans" the rest of the sentence would be correct.

Lastly, the weekly ui claims reports are people who have lost their jobs (413,000 last week) and in the past ('90's) almost 400,000 of those would have found comparable replacement work. In the past that only took a few weeks and they found good or better jobs. These days it is taking 21 weeks and longer for those who do find work and they're having to take less pay or benefits or both.

Somewhat less than 400,000 people unemployed is about the normal weekly turnover. Below that, more people find work than lose work (growth), above that more people stay on unemployment and are out of work than find work (contraction).

Two sources that I monitor make it clear that there has been a major turnaround in the job market in the last year. Before the dot-com collapse, the Stanford Alumni mailing list was chock-full of requests to hire software techies. For the following two years, the bulk of the job-related requests were from software techies looking for jobs. For at least the last six months, requests from employers have again outnumbered requests from job-seekers. I've noticed a similar though less-pronounced trend on the AZTECH-Jobs mailing list, which discusses techie jobs in Arizona.

The job market is improving.

But there are many people are available to work if jobs are easy to find and wages are high. Housewives, students, and the retired will come forward if the price is right.

Precisely, and that's why I'm not losing sleep over "those who have given up looking for work". And I don't think that anyone else should either.

As for those who have "given up looking for work", just who in the hell are they? If I was the sole support for my family and I was out of work, I would never give up looking for a job. Who are these people?

Liberals that still have "Vote Gore" signs hanging out their broken windows.

Precisely, and that's why I'm not losing sleep over "those who have given up looking for work". And I don't think that anyone else should either.

I'm in NY, and the news papers wanted ads are full of job openings. Jobs are everywhere.

The journalistic sleight of hand...

Can the leftist RATS keep this up charade? If they hold their breath long enough, will they turn blue? (Please?)