July National Employment Data — A Quick Review

Find the 38p (PDF) August 1 release of July’s data here. Among other things:

HEADLINE RATE — rose from 6.1% unemployed to 6.2%. No human being knows if that means anything at all.

REAL RATE — rose from 12.1% in June to 12.2%. This is the all-inclusion “real slack in the economy” measure. Of note, however, it was 13.9% in July 2013 (these are seasonally adjusted numbers, by the way — see page 26).

CONSTRUCTION EMPLOYMENT — see page 28. Up (on a seasonally adjusted basis) from 5,830,000 in July 2013 to 6,041,000 in July 2014. That’s not actually all that good.

WORKING PART-TIME B/C CAN’T FIND A BETTER JOB — 7,511,000 people in July 2014, down from 8,180,000 one year earlier. This is a sign that people who want to work are finding work (of some sort). See page 19.

PART-TIME AS PERCENT OF TOTAL EMPLOYED — in addition to the folks above, there were 19,662,000 people working part-time because, apparently, that’s what they wanted. Add it up: It’s 27.17 million people working part-time, the majority by choice.

SELF-EMPLOYED — also on page 19 — 8,424,000 in July 2014, vs. 8,850,000 one year earlier. That’s down significantly, and it’s hard to know why. Additionally, a self-employed person MIGHT or MIGHT NOT be working full-time, or part-time . . . or 8 hours a week.

ADDING UP THE SCATTERED NOT-REALLY-FULL-TIME-PEOPLE — adding up the July 2014 numbers, there were 35.6 million people working part-time OR who were self-employed. On page 12, the government says there were 116.8 million people working (all jobs, full- and part-time).

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. . . if The EleBlog’s understanding of these statistics is correct . . .

• 30.4% of those working are NOT full-time employees of a going enterprise.

• In a nation of more than 310 million people, only 81.2 million have full-time jobs.

• The number NOT IN THE LABOR FORCE (people who could be working but are not for some reason) was 72.2 million, seasonally adjusted, in July 2014. These two numbers appear to be headed for a convergence of some sort. It’s hard to figure how that could be a good thing . . .

Source: http://electricalcontractor.com/?p=15279

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