Employment Situation - June 2010 (Obamaconomics = FAILURE!)

Bureau of Labor Statistics ^ | July 2, 2010 | BLS

[C19fan]

Total nonfarm payroll employment declined by 125,000 in June, and the unemployment rate edged down to 9.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The decline in payroll employment reflected a decrease (-225,000) in the number of temporary employees working on Census 2010. Private-sector payroll employment edged up by 83,000.

[C19fan]

/src on/Look at the bright side. Zero wanted to make the US more like Europe and now we are headed to European like labor force participation rates./src off/

[NC28203]

>>>If they are truly random sampling and performing monthly polls, then it is a little suspicious that I have never received a call in my 23 some odd years of work life asking if I am employed or not for BLS information purposes.

Not really that suspicious. 60,000 households reached each month results in 720,000 hhs per year. With about 110MM hhs in the country, odds in a given year amount to about 1 in 150.

[Hoodat]

Is that from The Vision of the Anointed?

[Mere Survival]

God bless you and good luck! Never give up.

[Hoodat]

The number of people employed part-time due to economic reasons (e.g. hourly cutbacks / couldn’t find fulltime work) increased by 350,000 last month.

[jurroppi1]

Remove households with unlisted numbers, and known retires people, and the odds are probably better that I should’ve gotten a call by now in the last 20-23 years. Regardless, they could be getting a better understanding of the numbers if they used a more realistic and proper sampling method. Phone polling has been shown severally to be at best inconsistent statistically (I’ve taken dozens of stats classes and that gets brought up almost every time sampling plans are discussed).

[Mere Survival]

Clintons’s administration in addition to what you said of removing those who have “quit looking” from the unemployment number . . . Clinton’s administration also stopped using the Consumer Price Index as the inflation measure so they could save money on automatic increases on entitlements (and so the administration would look better).

[Hoodat]

So if I get laid off and subsequently get my phone cut off since I can no longer pay the bill, I will never be included in a BLS survey?

[Mere Survival]

So they do these phone surveys - doesn’t that strike you as a little inaccurate maybe? Sigh....
____________________________________________________________

60,000 is a HUGE sample. Polls are usally 1,000 I think. Should be pretty accurate.

[Mere Survival]

So they do these phone surveys - doesn’t that strike you as a little inaccurate maybe? Sigh....
____________________________________________________________

60,000 is a HUGE sample. Polls are usally 1,000 I think. Should be pretty accurate.

[Mere Survival]

Not too fishy for you as an individual. But what about for all of us. My math:

There are 114,000,000 households in the USA.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_households_are_in_the_US

60,000 are polled so
114,000,000 / 60,000 = 1900
You have a one in 1,900 chance of being polled in any month.

12 monthly polls a year.
1900 / 12 = 158
You have a 1 in 158 chance of being polled in any given year.

Median Age = 36 years old

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html

So the average person here at FR will have had say 16 years of being an adult in the household that might get polled.
158/16 = ~10

SO, the average person here should have a 1 in 10 chance of having already been polled for the governments employment figures.

I haven’t been. Have YOU?

[NC28203]

>>>Regardless, they could be getting a better understanding of the numbers if they used a more realistic and proper sampling method.

Are you suggesting something like a monthly census? The cost would be substantial, and I get the impression that the concept of having governement workers coming to the door to ask questions is not all that popular around this web site.

[jurroppi1]

No, I’m suggesting actually looking at removing the retired population from the polling data and the polled population, as well as the infirm, and underage (those not legally allowed to work because of age reasons), and quite possibly not looking at employer stated employment - especially that of illegals so the population isn’t so skewed. Of all the US households, how many are actually legal non retired workers? Looking at the UI roles is one good place to start, but you also have to look at many other items to get a clear picture. A simple telephone poll of 60K people monthly is hardly a robust method IMO.

Perhaps a lot of people that have been out of work for an extended time may not have standard telephone service, which makes it unlikely they will be polled. Unfortunately that also makes it more unlikely they will find work!

[griswold3]

‘Business did not like the US president, and the president did not like business,” he (Jeffery Immelt) said,

[Tammy8]

Who is counted as unemployed? Only those drawing unemployment or by polling households? I have seen reference to both methods but don’t know what the government uses in official figures.

[C19fan]

See post 70.

[listenhillary]

I’m pretty sure that the quote is from that book.

[griswold3]

I’m shocked, shocked, I say, that they are padding the stats in DC!

[Tammy8]

Thank you! Not sure how I missed that post.

[NVDave]

No - a large number of people are considered to no longer be in the workforce, the “labor force participation rate” - which went down by 0.3%.

Put another way, the BLS says that the size of the whole labor force decreased by 650K+ people.

Smaller workforce, unemployment rate goes down.

The labor force size has remained nearly flat for the last three years. Had the participation rate not declined so much in the ‘07 to ‘09 years, we’d be printing a U-3 unemployment rate of over 11.5%.

As with all these reports, I keep thumping on the barrel, telling Freepers to read the guts of these reports. They’re free, they’re easily accessible, and they’re not hugely difficult to interpret. They are, however, as exciting as watching paint dry. I don’t dispute that when you read enough of these wretched things, you want to puke up your socks before you read another one. But the good news is this: they don’t change in format or style. Once you learn how to read the BLS and BEA reports, and you’ve read, oh, three of them in a row, you know where to look in the reams of data for the deltas you’re seeking. I don’t read through every damn line in these wretched things any more - I can flip through, looking for the nuggets I want to find, because the interesting things are in the same place (relatively speaking) in every report.

Look at “Household Data, Summary Table A.” Read down through it, and you’ll see how the figures estimating a) the size of the workforce and b) the numbers of people no longer in the workforce spell out a different story than the headline number.

This is all what to examine before we start worrying about seasonal adjustments, the stupid “birth/death” model, etc.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf