Now isn't that con-vee-nient?

Oops.

So much for the monthly Jobs Report. One of the effects of the government shutdown (no Fox News, it is NOT a "slimdown") is no monthly Jobs Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS web site has a "Special Notice":

This website is currently not being updated due to the suspension of Federal government services. The last update to the site was Monday, September 30. During the shutdown period BLS will not collect data, issue reports, or respond to public inquiries. Updates to the site will start again when the Federal government resumes operations. Revised schedules will be issued as they become available.

Quite convenient for those members of Congress who deem most of us as not worthy of worrying about, yet manage to whine about how they need their pay check to get by - as if the 800K federal employees don't need theirs!

ADP did release their monthly report on private sector jobs on Wednesday, showing an increase of 166K in the private sector (and of course economists surprised as the number was lower than "expected"). The Wall St Journal looked at the numbers in a bit of detail (you can reach behind the WSJ Paywall by Googling the article title "U.S. Businesses Add 166,000 Jobs, ADP Report Shows"). The numbers that jumped out at me are:

Service-sector jobs increased by 147,000 last month, while the factory sector added a slim 1,000 new positions. Financial services cut 4,000 jobs.

Despite September's gain, job growth is weakening. Over the three months through September, the economy added an average of 162,000 private jobs per month, down from 220,000 at the start of the year, according to ADP.

Service sector jobs increase by 147K and manufacturing increases by 1K. It's a McJobs economy!

Business Insider offers us a listing of "what we know" even without the BLS figures. Of course, they base this to a large extent on "market economists' expectations" (see above link to previous blog post about "Economists surprised").

Bloomberg tells us that economists will just talk about football:

The absence of jobs data leaves economists and their investor clients without the month’s most important numbers on which to place bets, ranging from friendly office pools to million-dollar wagers on the health of the world’s largest economy.

Meanwhile, Reuters tells us Workers and employers face off at U.S. Supreme Court:

(Reuters) - Workplace disputes pepper the docket of cases the U.S. Supreme Court will take up during a nine-month term starting on Monday, with the justices having delivered a string of victories to businesses and employers in their last term.

Organized labor will feature in two of the cases. In one, an employee seeks to limit the power of public-sector unions to collect dues. In the other, an employee aims to limit the ability of private-sector unions to sign up members.

It would constitute a significant blow to the labor movement were the court, split 5-4 between Republican and Democratic presidential appointees, to rule against the unions in both cases, legal experts say.

Since the composition of the SCOTUS has not changed in the past few months, I am not going to hold my breath on workers getting any breaks from this court. In June, Businessweek declared the current court as Corporate America's Employees of the Month. It is not a stretch, it is not a difficult prediction to say more 5 - 4 decisions, more rulings in favor of our corporate overlords are coming in the next few months.

I bet Lloyd Blankfein will go to sleep at night dreaming of the wage slaves he can continue to abuse.

And because I can:

Giving Up Is Not an Option

This morning while I was surfing through the various news sites, I spotted this article from Fortune (via CNN) with the headline:

What happens when the jobless give up?

As one of the millions of long term un/underemployed I can only say that for myself, giving up is not a viable option. I search everyday for a position within my professional field of Software Quality Assurance and Testing.

I have written a few posts about my skills, both official (resume skills) and unofficial (not pertinent to the resume but job skills nevertheless). I have written about why I love my professional field and about being an unemployed human and not a statistic. I have written about how folks have it far worse than I do, coping with the job search as well as numerous times discussing the idiocies of our elected officials and the talking heads.

They Really Think We Are Stupid

Whew! A bit dusty over here. I hadn't realized it had been over three months since I last posted something here but with all the news this week I guess I figure it's time to throw out my 2¢ once again.

The official unemployment rate is now at 9.8%. Nine point eight per cent. And this is just the "official rate" reported by Labor is the "U3." The truer rate is probably contained in the U6 which is over 17%.

It is December 2010 and this is the longest sustained stretch of unemployment over 9% since the Great Depression. While ADP in their monthly reporting of jobs added for November showed an estimated 93,000 new private sector jobs for November 2010, the official Department of Labor report showed only 39,000 jobs added in total for November 2010. This is in an economy that needs to add 100k - 150k jobs per month just to maintain status quo. Now we add in that two million people currently collecting unemployment will be losing their unemployment insurance benefits during December 2010 and another uptick in initial jobless claims for the last week of November and it is going to be a horrendous Christmas season for a lot of people in the United States.

Running Out Of Adjectives for the Economy

I've always had a pretty good vocabulary. I read above grade level pretty much from the beginning. In high school, we had to learn vocabulary words every week, increasing from fifteen to fifty words a week and I usually did well on the tests. I didn't score all that well on the SAT (though I did on the ACT) so I chalk the SAT score up to a bit of cultural bias (as a proud son of the South, sometimes the word usage might not have been as pristine as the educators who write the tests might have wanted.)

But I am running out of ways to describe the levels of idiocy associated with the economy and jobs situation today. From the reports themselves to the "surprise" expressed by the pundits to the "analysis" done by reporters there are so many mis-statements, specious reasonings, and outright cluelessness that I'm beyond dumbfounded.

First off was this article from Wednesday, 8/4, on ADP's monthly report of private sector jobs combined with a report from Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, Inc on planned job cuts from both private and public sources. ADP reported 42K jobs created for July while Challenger, Gray's report showed an equal number of planned cuts for July.

It's Not Just That It's Spin, It's Bad Spin

A couple of days ago, I saw this headline from the AP (via MSNBC):

Layoffs of census workers will distort jobs data

I found the headline a bit dishonest but considering that it was the AP, I was not all that surprised since the AP has moved far from the days when it was a premier news gathering and reporting agency. Unfortunately for a lot of folks, though, as the AP has gotten worse, more and more newspapers and news sites rely on it because they've cut their own news gathering staff to a minimum.

Then this morning, I saw this article from today's NY Times where the reporter used the same dishonest framing in her lede:

The June jobs report, which comes out on Friday, will probably look very bad, reinforcing worries that the recovery is teetering. But first impressions might be deceiving.

Folks, the "distortion" in the jobs data was not due to the lay-off of Census workers. It was due to the admittedly temporary nature of the Census hiring in the first place. So when the economy loses 125K jobs and the private sector has created only 83K according to today's Jobs Report, that is a more accurate reflection of the official numbers.

As One of the "Small People," I Can Use a Job

Is it a pre-requisite for senior executives at BP to be so gaffe prone? First we have Tony Hayward and his foot chewing now followed by the linguistic stylings of Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg:

I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don’t care,” he said. “But that is not the case with BP. We care about the small people.

The apologists have been out in force, attempting to find ways to explain this as anything other than arrogance and a true reflection of Svanberg's (and BP's) feelings for those who are not them. The most common excuse I've seen is that it's purely due to language difficulties, since English is not Svanberg's native tongue.

I will grant that English is a difficult language to learn and master and I applaud all those people around the world who have elected to learn the language, exceptions included. They've mastered something I've spent my life trying to master while I've not been able to master my few attempts at learning another language (Spanish was the one I attempted and though my instructors were not the greatest, it's still my own damn fault for not learning.) I have a reasonable knowledge of grammar and a fairly good vocabulary and for the life of me, I can not really come up with a phrasing or way that Svanberg could have said this without insulting others. Rather like Leona Helmsley's "Only the little people pay taxes" quip.

Mr Bernanke, It Really Is Time For You To Do Your Job

What's that you say? You're already doing your job?

No, no you're not. Or at least, not that part of your job (pdf) that is supposed to

promote the objectives of maximum employment, stable prices,
and moderate long-term interest rates.

You see, the weekly Job Report (AP via NY Times) came out today and once again "surprised" the economists by showing an increase of 25k more initial jobless claims for the week instead of the expected decrease of 4K. That is 471K new jobless claims for the week.

(As an aside, is Economics known as the "Dismal Science" due to the abysmal record most economists have in their predictions? It sure looks like a group where getting one thing correct over the years allows an economist to dine out for the rest of his/her career on the accolades, no matter how p*ss poor every other prediction they make is.)

Now a quick check of der Google shows various news stories over the past few years (here and here for example) where Bernanke and others are talking about how "inflation concerns" are the driving economic force, even more than employment issues (you know, 9.9% Unemployment rate and such things).

The Jobs Reports from 5/7/2010

I was looking at today's Job Reports in the NY Times that the economy added 290K jobs during April. A small piece of good news. But as I mentioned yesterday, the economy lost 444K jobs (presumably since there were that many new unemployment applications. Not quite as many as the week before, but still means there were 154K more new unemployment applicants in one week than jobs created for the month. And the overall unemployment rate went up to 9.9% due to approximately 195K people returning to the job search (according to the NY Times article. This CNN article says:

The rise in the unemployment rate is actually a sign of improving perception of labor market conditions. The increase was due to an uptick in job seekers who had previously been discouraged and dropped out of the job market. There was a jump of 805,000 workers returning to the labor force in April alone.

Part of the problem is it takes 100K new jobs just to maintain the status quo and accommodate the new jobs needed each month. According to the NY Times article linked above,

With revisions on Friday, April was the fourth consecutive month that the economy added workers (a revised 230,000 jobs were added in March, instead of 162,000). Besides March, February was revised from a loss of 14,000 jobs to a gain of 39,000. With a January gain of 14,000, the cumulative increase came to 573,000 jobs in four months.