October 5, 2018

Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in September

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The American economy gained 134,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at a miserable 44,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dropped to 3.7 percent, which was a little odd. The number of new jobs really was low, but the number of unemployed dropped by a respectable 270,000. But where did their jobs come from?

  • The civilian labor force increased by 150,000 but 420,000 people found new jobs.
  • New jobs increased by 134,000 and the unemployed found 270,000 jobs. This adds up to 404,000 newly employed

These numbers add up pretty closely, but what jobs did the unemployed find? Old ones? Unreported ones? Part time occasional jobs? I’m not clear about that. However, the employment-population ratio ticked up from 60.3 percent to 60.4 percent, so there were definitely more people working in the market labor force than before.

Wages of production and nonsupervisory workers were up at an annualized rate of 3.3 percent. The annualized rate of inflation right now is 2.7 percent, which means that blue-collar workers increased their real wages by 0.6 percent, which is so-so. Taking everything together, this wasn’t the worst jobs report ever, but it was still a pretty mediocre one, and well under expectations.

POSTSCRIPT: President Trump is very fond of tweeting out the early job estimates from ADP, which bases its estimate on a survey of about 20 percent of all private US employees.

This got me curious: how closely do the ADP estimates track the BLS estimates: Here’s the chart:

There’s a ton of noise here, and the September numbers diverged considerably. ADP predicted 230,000 new jobs while the BLS estimated only 134,000 new jobs. This kind of noise is invevitable when you survey with two very different instruments, and it’s impossible to say which is more accurate. Over the long term they agree pretty closely, and ADP claims that their goal is to match the final revision of the BLS numbers, not the first print. If that’s really the case, then in a couple of months the BLS will revise its September number up to around 230,000. Wait and see.

In any case, Wall Street traders generally take the ADP numbers as gold, and if the BLS numbers come in lower then the economy has come in “below expectations.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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