Every month Gallup estimates the percentage of the population aged 18 and older that is employed full time by an employer for at least 30 hours a week. The results are based on a series of questions Gallup asks in interviews of some 30,000 people, about 18,000 of whom are in the workforce. Gallup does not count adults who are self-employed, working part time, unemployed, or out of the workforce as payroll-employed in the P2P metric.
P2P is thus no substitute for the monthly jobs report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it and the frequently off-the-mark monthly jobs report from Automated Data Processing may be the only employment gauges we will have for the time being: The BLS is not currently scheduled to provide a report on Friday as it normally would because of the government shutdown.
For September, Gallup's P2P slipped slightly from 43.7 percent in August to 43.5 percent. From last September to this, the measure has fallen from 45.1 percent:
The employment situation improved in the late summer and early fall of 2012, with the P2P rate in August through October increasing by more than one point over the same months in 2011. That momentum slowed in the winter, and the P2P rate has stayed the same or slightly declined for eight out of nine months this year, compared with the same months in 2012.
Although P2P is down, the percentage of Americans working full time for themselves has gone up slightly, but this does not account for all of the year-over-year decline in P2P. Full-time self-employment is at 5.3% in September, up from 5.1% in August and 5.0% in September 2012.
At the link, you can also see Gallup's measure of the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate (7.9 percent) and the workforce participation rate (67 percent), both of which are far different than the BLS's monthly report and fluctuate wildly from month to month. For example, Gallup estimated August unemployment at 8.7 percent while the BLS reported 7.3 percent.
8:41 AM PT: The Labor Department states: “Due to the lapse in funding, the Employment Situation release which provides data on employment during the month of September, compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, will not be issued as scheduled on Friday, October 4, 2013. An alternative release date has not been scheduled.”