On the heels of a week of bad economic news, the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics had something comparatively good in its monthly jobs report this morning. The private sector added 154,000 jobs in July, according to seasonally adjusted figures. Public-sector layoffs of 37,000 cut that gain to 117,000. The report was considerably better than the estimate of a consensus of experts surveyed by Bloomberg earlier this week. Interest in the statistics was so high that it apparently crashed the servers at the BLS site. Details will be added when they are back in business.
The official unemployment rate—U3—(which is calculated from a different survey than the one determining the number of jobs gained or lost) fell to 9.1 percent. It was the first drop since March. But it was partly a reflection of more workers leaving the labor force. An alternative measure of unemployment—U6—that includes part-time workers who want full-time work and some discouraged workers fell to 16.1%, but remains high.
The number of Americans without work for six months or more fell to 6.2 million in July.
The civilian labor force participation rate dropped in July to 63.9 percent,
and the employment-population ratio was steady at an exceedingly low 58.1 percent.
Revisions changed job gains previously reported for May from 25,000 to 56,000, and for June from 18,000 to 46,000.
Unemployment rates for adult men was at 9 percent; adult women 7.9 percent; teenagers 25 percent; whites 8.1 percent; blacks 15.9 percent, and Latinos 11.3 percent. The jobless rate for Asians was 7.7 percent, not seasonally adjusted. American Indians are not included because the BLS does not take a large enough sample of their population to make a reasonable calculation of their out-of-work numbers.
The unemployment rate for Americans aged 16-19 is 25 percent. But for African Americans, it is 39.2 percent; for Latinos, it is 36 percent.
Contrasted with the 300,000 jobs lost in July 2009, today's report is a vast improvement. Last year the job loss was 49,000, largely as a result of lay-offs of temporary Census workers. if the level of net job creation that has occurred in the first seven months of 2011 remained steady, it would take another 59 months, until June 2016, to reach the pre-recession level of employment as measured in December 2007. The longest previous post-World War II job recovery took 47 months. This time, it could take more than twice that many.
“The labor market, despite some gains, remains in a rather fragile state,” Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, said before the report. Rupkey projected payrolls would increase by 130,000. “Businesses remain cautious and it will take a number of years before the unemployment rate gets back to pre-recession levels. The anxiety level is high and risks of a slowdown are everywhere.”
As a number of studies have shown, the longer people are unemployed, the more likely they are to stay unemployed because they tend to lose their skills and get discouraged about seeking work. If they get discouraged long enough, they fall right out of the unemployment statistics, although the BLS makes an effort with its U6 gauge to include some of them.
The global economy demands that we create policies that take a far more pro-active stand than anything we've seen for the past 70 years. As noted in Joan McCarter's important diary, The Democrats' silver bullet for 2012, the Alliance for American Manufacturing has a built a list of policy ideas along this line. Among these is a reexamination of a trade policy which has gravely damaged our industrial capacity and thrown millions of skilled, middle-class workers into foreclosure and McJobs.
In addition, we need a package of programs that provide unemployment benefits simultaneously with training and retraining for jobs that will really exist by the time the training is completed and into a least the mid-range future.
Such programs, however, would be only gum to plug the holes in a system where, in the past few decades, wealth has been transferred ever more upward until the top 1 percent owns 40 percent of all assets, the top 25 percent owns 87 percent, and the net worth of the average single black woman is $5. To correct that means a revision of our tax code that does not reduce top rates to what they were 85 years ago.
Government oversight has been steadily dismantled, which helped deliver us into the worst economic mess in 75 years. Yet only modest new regulations have been enacted. We have no industrial policy—something every other developed nation has long had in place. Our unemployment catastrophe is not out there somewhere, unconnected to these other matters. It is, in great part, their product.
Democrats can keep ineffectually fighting rearguard actions. Or they can fight for a better tomorrow. It is true that the extremists who now have the Republican party in a headlock will, for next year and a half, block or dilute or demolish any useful proposals Democrats put forward. But that doesn't mean they should not be put forward. Quite the opposite ought to be the case. Showing Americans what Democrats would do when they are again in the majority is smart politics. It helps get them that majority. On the other hand, no-can-do is a terrible campaign slogan.
Among other statistics in today's report:
• Number of people working part time involuntarily (who would prefer full-time work) was 8.4 million
• Employment in the retail trade rose 26,000
• Mining employment was up 9000
• Manufacturing employment was up 24,000
• Employment in health care services rose 31,000
• The average workweek for production and non-supervisory workers was unchangedat 34.3 hours.
• The average hourly earnings for all employees on private
nonfarm payrolls by 10 cents, to 23.13.
To get a better handle on the BLS monthly job report, I urge you to read my diary, Some advice on reading the numbers.
Note: This diary was updated from the original in several places after the Bureau of Labor Statistics computer servers were restored to service.