Several positive trends continued in January. Firms added 52,000 temporary workers and increased hours, just as they did in December, hinting at growing if cautious optimism. Employment rose in health, education and professional services, and retail employment grew by 42,000 in January, on a seasonally adjusted basis, after declining in December. Manufacturing employment also grew, by 11,000, the first increase since the beginning of recession. Analysts point out that the adjustment of the data is tricky around the holiday season, and actual underlying employment may have grown in January.
But many economists may view this release as more disappointing than the previous month’s figure. The Labour Department published the results of its annual benchmark revision of previous employment data. Through the 12 months to March 2009, the American economy lost 930,000 more jobs than had been previously estimated. It now appears that over 700,000 jobs were lost in each of the first three months of last year, a significantly worse performance than originally thought. Meanwhile, data for the last two months of 2009 were revised to show a larger increase in employment in November, but a larger decline in December, for a net drop of 5,000 jobs relative to previous reports.
And while the employment-population ratio increased slightly from December to January, and off record lows, the problem of the long-term unemployed continues to grow. Just over 41% of all unemployed workers, over 6.3m workers, have been out of work for 27 weeks or more.
So…um…uh…if it’s a [i]jobless[/i] recovery…um…who exactly is recovering?
Are real wages going up? Are taxes going down? Are expenses going down? Do we have more people owning their own homes? Are there less homeless people? Are tax revenues going up? Are we safer? Is the economy stabilized?
What defines a recovery?
Mish has a good analysis of the data here:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/02/jobs-contract-yet-again-unemployment.html
“Looking ahead, there is no driver for jobs and states in forced cutback mode are making matters far worse.”
Hi Rev Harmon,
Thanks for all that you do and thanks for the link. I found this to be particularly telling:
[blockquote]Grim Statistics
The official unemployment rate is 9.7%. However, if you start counting all the people that want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.
It reflects how unemployment feels to the average Joe on the street. U-6 is 16.5%. Both U-6 and U-3 (the so called “official” unemployment number) are poised to rise further although most likely at a slower pace than earlier this year.[/blockquote] So evidently, a recovery is now defined as a slower rate of decline.