Friday, July 02, 2004

Brand new numbers...

...same old story, as the national unemployment rate holds tough at 5.6%.

There were 112,000 new jobs reported, though, but that's kind of slim compared to the 250,000 that financial analysts expected.

Slim, too, compared to the 140,000 jobs it takes every month just to keep up with population growth, as Atrios reminds us.

And even slimmer compared to the numbers reported in April and May, but then again, the numbers reported in April and May are somewhat slimmer now, having been revised down by a total of 35,000 positions.

We're left to wonder how bad it might have been if the new jobs were actually full time jobs. Reuters reports that
...there were some signs of broader weakness, including a decrease in the average workweek to 33.6 hours from 33.8 in May, the shortest since a matching level in December. The manufacturing sector lost 11,000 jobs, a reversal after four straight months in which factories added jobs after years of decline.
Nathan Newman offers an instructive graph and notes that
More or less jobs can be a deceptive measure of the strength of the economy-- more jobs could mean more part-time jobs and less hours for existing workers, while stagnant job growth can conceal increased overtime as production ramps up...however you cut it, the economy is generating far fewer hours of work today than it did in early 2001 when Bush was inaugurated.
But don't worry, Bush is full of confidence, which is a good thing. Confidence is an important quality for job applicants, and if we work hard enough, employed or not, in a few months he'll be brushing up the resume in search of his next gig.

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