By Frank Stricker April 13, 2025 For the most part, the latest job numbers were more of the same. The official unemployment rate at 4.2% was in the 4.0% – 4.2% range where it has been for a year. As we see in the Full Count, the unemployment rate for whites was 3.7%, and for… Read More The Unemployment News for March 2025, and What’s Ahead
By Frank Stricker March 22, 2025 The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) numbers in the jobs report for February do not show any spectacular changes. It is too early to see much of an impact from Trump-Administration layoffs. But there were hints, however small, that in some areas, all was not well. The official unemployment… Read More The Calm Before the Storm: The Jobs Report for February 2025
by Frank Stricker The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Employment Situation report for January appeared on February 7. There were important revisions in the basic population numbers that the Bureau uses in its sampling process. That meant significant changes in some of the numbers, including that fewer jobs were created in 2023 and 2024 than… Read More The Job Situation in January 2025 and The Bigger Picture
By Frank Stricker January 21, 2025 The number of non-farm jobs, which comes from employer reports, grew by 256,000 in December. That was more than expected. For the whole of 2024, the total number of non-farm jobs increased by 2.2 million or 1.4%. That percentage doesn’t look so great. In the household survey, the number… Read More Getting Better All the Time? (Don’t Drown While Wading Through the Numbers…) The Jobs Report for December 2024
By Frank Stricker 12/16/24 The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Situation for November suggests that the labor market got over the big bump of strikes and storms that resulted in few job additions in October. Just 12,000 jobs were added then. In November, 227,000 jobs were added—not enough, but pretty good by conventional standards and… Read More The Jobs Report for November 2024; Five Decades of Stagnant Wages
