 |
| You talkin' to me? |
The full pdf report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is here.
The official number of unemployed fell to 11.7 million from 12.0 million last month, but nearly 500,000 left the civilian labor force in the seasonally-adjusted measure. In the raw measure the civilian labor force participation rate is down to 63.1%, the only other example of which in the data going back to 1948 was in July 1976. Those not in the labor force rose year over year by about 2.5% to almost 90.5 million.
Multiple job-holding is up barely 2% year over year in the report. Full-time with a secondary part-time job is up 7.7% year over year. Holding two part-time jobs is down 7.9% year over year. Part-time for both voluntary and involuntary reasons is not much changed year over year: Voluntary is up about 1.2%, involuntary is actually down less than one half of one percent in the seasonally-adjusted category, but down 1.7% in the raw numbers. . . . I'm not yet seeing any convincing evidence in the data to date that ObamaCare is part-timing the country in general. Full-time by either measure is actually up a little, by about 0.7% year over year.
Total nonfarm employment is either 134.5 million not-seasonally-adjusted, or 135.2 million seasonally-adjusted, up less than 1.5% year over year. Peak was in January 2008 at 138 million seasonally-adjusted, so the depression in employment continues, driven by the loss of full-time jobs, which in the raw measure are still down 8.4 million from the July 2007 peak, or 6.8%.
Jobs added per month on average for the last year has been at the level of 169,000. Both January and February saw upward revisions to the previous reports of jobs added in the neighborhood of 30,000 each month. Jobs added in March at 88,000 looks like a big stall in the trend, but we'll have to wait a month or two for the revisions to say that with certainty.
At the current rate of job addition, Obama will be long gone (one hopes) before full-time jobs come back. Of the 169,000 jobs added per month on average in the last year, only somewhere between 63,000 and 73,000 are full-time per month based on the year over year gains in full-time. Call it 68,000 per month, that's 816,000 per year, so it will take only 10.3 more years to add back those 8.4 million full-time jobs we're down and get us back to the level of 2007 . . . in the year 2023.
Way to go, Brownie!
