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from the probably-not-coming-back-either dept.
The World Socialist Web Site reports
The US employment report for October released by the Labor Department on Friday, four days before Election Day, provided a snapshot of an economy that continues to be mired in stagnation. The net nonfarm payroll increase was a tepid 161,000, with the bulk of the new jobs, as in previous months, made up of low-wage service and part-time positions.
Economists had predicted a payroll increase of 173,000. Even with a combined upward revision of 44,000 jobs for the months of August and September, the overall rate of job-creation has slowed markedly, averaging 181,000 a month through October as compared to 229,000 for all of 2015.
The number of long-term unemployed remained at 2 million, comprising 25.2 percent of those officially counted in the government tally. These are extraordinarily high numbers for the seventh year of a so-called "recovery".
The decline in the official unemployment rate to 4.9 percent in October from 5.0 percent in September was not the result of workers joining the labor force and finding jobs, but the departure of 425,000 more working-age Americans, bringing the number of such workers who are outside the labor force to a near-record high of 94.6 million.
The labor force participation rate actually declined, reaching 62.8 percent in October versus 62.9 percent the prior month.
Via a paywalled story on May 29, 2012 in U.S. News & World Report, Economics professor Antony Davies, PhD said (Google cache) that it takes 180,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So, anything less is actually a loss of US jobs.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday November 07 2016, @05:50PM
- Official unemployment has been cut in half, from 10% to 5% since 2009. Now, granted, that leaves out people who've given up trying to find work, which leads us to the next number ...
- Labor force participation is up about 1% year-over-year since last year. In other words, more people are working or actively looking for work.
Agreed that things aren't as dire as mentioned here.
The "unemployment" numbers are always difficult to interpret, given labor force participation issues. As are the raw jobs numbers, which don't track the changes of population.
Labor force participation is better, though it also needs to track shifts in demographics, particularly the fact that (1) there are more older people and thus more retirees who aren't planning on working, and (2) more people are choosing to go to college, thus making younger people less likely to be employed full-time.
If you actually track US employment per population 25-54 over time, you can actually see how that core demographic number is changing. That number surged upward from the late 60s to the mid 80s, as more women joined the workforce. It went up and down a bit over the decades, but took a nosedive in 2008. It has more or less been rising steadily since. If you really want to look at "employment" for the overall population, that's probably closer than most of the standard quoted metrics.