The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today released the Employment Situation Report for August 2010. This report showed a loss of (54,000) in the Establishment Survey (the survey of businesses), with a gain of 60,000 ex-census. Private sector employment increased by 67,000 for the month (and 763,000 for the year). The Household Survey (the survey of 60,000 households) showed a gain of 290,000 jobs, which lead to an unemployment rate (U-3) of 9.6%% and the more inclusive measure of unemployment (U-6) remained at 16.7%. The labor force grew by 550,000 (a good thing even if it pressures the unemployment rate) and the participation rate was 64.7%. Revisions to previous months took June to (175,000, and improvement of 46,000) , and July to (54,000, and improvement of 77,000). The employment-population ration was reported at 58.5, which is still at very low levels.
Also, the birth/death adjustment came in at +115,000 this month.
The unadjusted numbers were +70,000 for the Establishment Survey and (215,000) for the Household Survey.
The report can be found here.
The following graph of unemployment durations (through July) shows that we still have a major employment problem regardless of what economist Robert Barro says in the Wall Street Journal.
I responded to Mr. Barro's absurd claim that only by cutting unemployment benefits can we lower the unemployment rate over at Bonddad's Blog.
We can also see just how depressed job openings are through the JOLTS survey here:
This clearly shows that openings are still well below even the lows of the last recession, which is quite troubling since although we definitely bounced off the bottom, we still have a long way to go just to get back to the depressed levels of 2002.
And everyone's favorite chart from Calculated Risk:
Both the birth/death adjustment and the seasonal adjustment are in line with their 5 year averages.
Overall, this report is much better than expected, although still quite a bit less than spectacular. The growth in jobs (ex-census) is clearly not accelerating and with unemployment as high as it is, this is very troubling. With Q2 2010 GDP now in at 1.6% and Q3 looking to be in that general vicinity, it is quite unlikely that we are going to see any robust jobs growth for the remainder of the year, especially when one considers that the seasonal adjustment get very negative from here on out.