June 08, 2010
With so much focus on the deficit it’s probably hard to keep track of things like the unemployment rate. This is the likely explanation for a USA Today article that told readers in its first sentence: “last week’s disappointing report on the job market may not be as dreary as it appears.”
The article explained that many of the 411,000 workers who took jobs with the Census may have taken private sector jobs had they not had the option of working for the Census. According to the article, these people opted to take what they viewed as relatively high-paying and easy temporary jobs rather lower paying permanent positions in the private sector. It refers to evidence of a similar effect in prior years when Censuses were conducted.
It is important to note that the question is not whether the Census workers would have taken other jobs (they may have), but whether anyone would have taken the other jobs. The argument in USA Today is that low-paying jobs have gone unfilled because employers, who would have hired the Census workers, view other applicants as being unqualified. The comparisons to past Census years is dubious. The unemployment rate was 4.0 percent in 2000 and 5.0 percent when the 1990 Census was being conducted.
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