The U.S. loses jobs in January, and a year’s worth of revisions for the BLS
I’m not sure why, but I absolutely love when the release date for the Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll report falls on the first of the month. It just feels efficient. I know that makes me sound like a geek, so maybe you’ll be amused to find out that my good mood was ruined when I actually saw the numbers from today’s report. According to the BLS, the U.S. suffered a loss of 17,000 jobs in January, which if you didn’t already know, is pretty bad.
That’s not to say that a bad number wasn’t expected. The December report released last month reflected a gain of only 18,000 positions (a number that has since been revised to 82,000–but that’s a topic I want to discuss a little later). The economy is clearly in a slump and the employment situation reports were bound to feel the effects of that at some point. The unemployment rate remained relatively unchanged over the month and now stands at 4.9 percent.
All of the industry losses and gains were typical. Construction dropped 27,000 jobs, manufacturing cut 28,000. Health care added 27,000 positions, food services gained nearly 15,000. As a whole, the job market isn’t fluctuating in an unpredictable manner. Some sectors are weaker than others, but mindful job seekers should still be able to find great opportunities and willing employers. I know you must be sick of me writing about the benefits of a career in health care, but I won’t stop doing that until the industry stops generating positions (which, for the sake of the U.S. economy, let’s hope doesn’t happen).
Even though the payroll numbers from January were dismal and in many cases standard, one thing about last month’s BLS report that interested me was Table B, which can be found on page 5 of the copy of the report that I linked to above. This table outlines the revisions made to nonfarm employment numbers over the course of 2007, and if you have read any of my previous posts on BLS reports, you know that I am often concerned about revisions.
According to the figures listed in the table, the BLS revised its initial data for every month of the year, and all months except one underwent a revision that exceeded 10,000 jobs. Many people only hear the initial numbers when they’re released, never bothering to sift through the next report for possible (and inevitable) revisions. Revisions for 2007 were both good and bad, with four months experiencing a positive revision and eight months experiencing a negative one. Overall, the BLS anticipated that the U.S. had created about 200,000 more jobs than it really had, and over the course of 2007, the average number of jobs created each month was 95,000.