February brings another loss in jobs, let’s hold out hope that it won’t get any worse.
Revision fever hits again! If I did have an obsession with payroll numbers being revised, our country’s Bureau of Labor Statistics would certainly be fueling my obsession on a consistent basis.
February’s employment situation report, released this morning, reveals that the payroll totals from December and January have both been adjusted downward. These revisions don’t exactly complement the headline of the report, which states that the U.S. lost 63,000 jobs in the month of February alone. I don’t have enough energy at the moment to search for additional changes and compare numbers from BLS reports further back in 2007, but the revisions from December and January and the losses from February combine for a total deficit of nearly 110,000 positions.
My apologies for starting off strong, but I figured I would get the bad news out of the way as quickly as possible. You should also know that the manufacturing industry lost 52,000 positions in February. And construction dropped 39,000 jobs, while retail trade lost another 34,000. There, I feel better.
While the tone of last month’s employment situation report definitely wasn’t uplifting, there were a few positive changes worth noting. The health care sector added 36,000 positions, with the biggest gains coming in hospitals and ambulatory health care services. Food services and drinking places trended upward as well, adding another 20,000 jobs in February.
The unemployment rate in the U.S. stayed about the same, at 4.8 percent, but the labor force participation rate fell to 65.9 percent. The average earnings for workers in February increased by five cents to $17.80 an hour. Employees in the country now make an average of $599.86 a week, and it looks as though we’re set to break the $600 mark in March.
I suppose that last month the good was pretty good and the bad was really bad. The equation that seems to best explain our nation’s current employment situation is as follows: (+26,000 positions in service-producing industries) + (-89,000 in goods-producing industries) = one BLS report we’d all like to forget about.
Let’s hope that the payroll numbers from March help us rebound a bit from this dismal report.
April 7th, 2008 at 9:31 am
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