When the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the December 2003 employment figures, many people were surprised that if found only 1,000 jobs on net were created between November 2003. This number is far short of the 150,000 jobs that need to be created each month to keep up with population growth, which is a bottom floor on a real employment recovery. Once one delves deeper into the employment statistics, a more grim picture emerges. In industries where the change in seasonally adjusted employment is statistically significant (where there is less than 10 percent chance that the change was indistinguishable from zero), only a few industries had significant positive seasonally adjusted job growth: Funds, trusts and other financial vehicles, lessors of nonfinancial intangible assets (which are small sub-industries in the financial and real estate sectors), professional and business servies and employment services (temp agencies). In all of these except for the two sub-industries, the reason for the positive numbers was due to slower job losses than is typically seen between November and December. Furthermore, the growth in temp agencies does not signify an employment recovery (although it may suggest that one is coming soon). Overall, the Bush Administration and Republican congressmen's assertions that things are getting better for workers is at best overly optimistic.

BLS Table 1 (Normal seasonal movements, estimated employment change between November and December 2003, and test of significance)

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©2004 Richard B. Goud, Jr.
Updated on 23 January 2004 at 22:00 PST