The unemployment rate edged down to 10.0 percent in November, and nonfarmpayroll employment was essentially unchanged (-11,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. In the prior 3 months, payroll job losse had averaged 135,000 a month. In November, employment fell in construction manufacturing, and information, while temporary help services and health care added jobs.
Let's look at the data:
First of all, the trend of establishment jobs continues in the right direction. Notice the rate of jub loss continues to decrease. However,
While the unemployment rate dropped last month, the overall trend is still rising. We need a few more months of data before we can claim a change in the overall trend.
There are some other good tidbits of news in the report.
A.) The civilian labor force dropped and the number of employed people increased. This goes to the method of calculating the unemployment number. The decrease in the unemployment rate was caused by an increase in employment -- not a statistical "method of calculation" issue.
B.) Good producing employment is still down: construction jobs decreased by 27,000 and manufacturing jobs decreased by 41,000.
C.) Professional services saw an increase of 86,000. Health care/education jobs increased by 40,000.
D.) Government jobs only increased by 7,000 -- so this is not a "public sector" job creation issue.
E.) Temporary employment increased 52,000. It has increased 117,000 since July.
F.) Hours worked increased as did overtime hours worked.
This is a damn good report.
8 comments:
Thanks for the anaylsis, this is mikecan1978 from dailykos and yes we still miss you.....SilverOz of all people made the top of the rec list with this report! No offence SilverOz.
Canada had a growth of 79 000 jobs....
AMEN.....Brother
The seasonal adjustment they used again was larger than normal, which is odd (the "average" adjustment for November would have given us a +100,000+ number give or take). It also means that I believe this number will be revised up to a decent positive next month (say +50,000).
Finally, even the household survey was up in both adjusted and unadjusted terms, which is great news.
Thanks to your blog I was pretty prepared for this number, looking at jobless claims data mainly.,
Man, if you go on marketwatch's comments though, the hate seething there is unbelievable.. "its all cooked numbers by the govt" is the main line.. havn't checked dailykos yet, hope the people can take good news for what it is...
anyway, just wanted to say thanks for all the analysis (and to the other contributors)..
This is exccellent news.
Hey Bonddad,
Glad to see you up and well on your own blog. Still wish you were posting over at DKOS. SilverOZ had a good diary on this earlier today, but lo and behold there is already a negative spin diary on the rec list. Not really a shocker.
Keep up the good work and I hope you return to DKOS some day.
Sustainability questions aside, NDD deserves HUGE PROPS for his work the past few weeks. As someone else pointed out, this blog (and a few others, but primarily NDD) were on top of this and deserve some kudos.
Very hard to find fault with today's NFP print. Headline better than expected, internals generally very, very good. It will be most interesting to see what the NFIB comes out with next Tuesday, as the pre-release tease clearly painted a dour picture. Interesting, too, that the stock market couldn't hold its gains on today's good news...it's looking a bit toppy and has had trouble right around 1100 since the middle of October.
All that said, I'm still about sustainability. If we can pull that rabbit out of a hat -- and I do have my doubts -- then it's all good.
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