June 04, 2011
The May jobs report was bad news, but it was not as bad as the Washington Post and many other news outlets made it seem. When we get monthly data it is always important to remember that we are pulling out a snapshot from a longer period of time. Firms do not make their hiring and firing decisions over a single month. They have general impressions of how many people they need and they adjust their workforce accordingly.
For this reason it is important to take the 54,000 jobs created in May against the backdrop of 234,000 jobs added in April. Employers who hired many workers in April were likely to add few or none in May. For example, the retail sector reportedly added 64,000 jobs in April. It lost 8,500 in May. Food manufacturing added 6,300 workers in April, it lost 7,000 in May.
It is more likely that the April numbers overstated the underlying rate of job growth in the economy and the May numbers understate it, than there was some huge shift in the economy between the two months. Still, the average rate of job growth over the last three months was just 160,000.
It takes roughly 90,000 jobs a month to keep even with the rate of growth of the labor force. This means that if the economy stayed on this growth path, it would take almost a decade to get back to normal levels of unemployment. Furthermore, with house prices falling again and another round of state and local cutbacks kicking in next month, it is more likely that the job growth will be slowing than speeding up in the months ahead.
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