(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Murky Jobs Signals from the New JOLTS Report

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BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Reserve, healthcare services, Janet Yellen, Jobs, JOLTS, recovery, subsidized private sector, turnover, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Economy-watchers just got another reminder today of how difficult it remains to figure out how healthy the current recovery is – from the data on employment turnover released by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The biggest surprise they delivered concerned the numbers of job openings reported (preliminarily) for February in the economy’s subsidized private sector.

Whereas the last few months of BLS data indicate that hiring in industries like healthcare services (which are heavily dependent on government support) hasn’t been quite so outsized as over the last decade, the new job turnover numbers (commonly known by their acronym JOLTS) suggest that they’re still punching above their weight.

If you think – as you should – that the real private sector should flat-out dominate job creation because it’s the economy’s leader in productivity and innovation, that’s not such a great development.

For the first three months of this year, the subsidized private sector accounted for 18.57 percent of the 533,000 total net new jobs America created. During the first three months of last year, this figure was 21.26 percent. These numbers will be revised several times more, but so far they signal that subsidized private sector jobs gains have lost some of their relative steam. (For more on the robust hiring in these industries during the current recovery, see this recent post.)

But the job turnover data appear to be sending the opposite message. Here we only have statistics going through February, and they’ll be revised down the road, too. But for the first two months of this year, 19.38 percent of the 11.368 million total job openings have come in the subsidized private sector. For the first two months of 2016, that figure was only 17.76 percent. In fact, the 1.138 million job openings estimated in the subsidized in February were the highest monthly total ever in absolute terms. (This data series started in 2000.)

To be sure, the subsidized private sector’s share of total job openings this year is a little below the levels that have held for most of the recovery. (See this post for more detail.) But its year-on-year rise is tough to square with the relative decline in actual job creation.

Another noteworthy result found in today’s job turnover report: The decline of retail job opportunities comes through plain as day. It’s not that the sector, whose bricks-and-mortars segment is under such tremendous pressure from on-line shopping, isn’t reporting any job openings at all. In fact, at 541,000 in February (on a preliminary basis), they were on the low end but still respectable by the standards of the last few years.

Look at the year-on-yer change, however, and you can see the retail employment problem. Reported job openings during January and February combined were down nearly ten percent. Those kinds of drops haven’t been seen since early in the recovery, in 2010.

These employment-related developments stand in especially stark contrast to the Federal Reserve’s apparent conclusion that the economy is just about fully recovered, and that the central bank’s new priority is sustaining “what we have achieved,” as chair Janet Yellen declared yesterday. This approach of course entails continuing to raise interest rates gradually, and reducing the immense amount of bonds the Fed bought as part of its stimulus program. Here’s hoping that the Fed’s confidence more accurately reflects the true state of the economy than these latest figures.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: With the Fed Seemingly Set to Tighten Again, Real Wages are in Recession

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BLS, blue-collar workers, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Federal Reserve, Great Recession, inflation-adjusted wages, manufacturing, real wages, recovery, Trump, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you had any doubts that American workers are experiencing a dramatic slowdown in inflation-adjusted wages, the newest figures on this pay indicator just put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should emphatically dispel them. In fact, they make clear that the nation is now stuck in a technical real wage recession – meaning that constant dollar hourly wages have fallen on net for at least two straight quarters. Moreover, when looking over the last two years, the worst results have been registered in price-adjusted hourly pay for blue-collar workers.

Keep that in mind if the Federal Reserve, as expected, announces a new tightening of monetary policy this afternoon, in large measure because the U.S. labor market supposedly has healed the wounds suffered during the Great Recession and the historically weak recovery that followed it.

For all private sector workers and for manufacturing workers, constant dollar hourly pay is down 0.19 percent since last March. And for blue-collar workers in these swathes of the economy, the story actually is slightly worse. Production and non-supervisory employees in the private sector overall have seen their after-inflation hourly pay fall by 0.33 percent since last February. For their counterparts in manufacturing, real wages are down 0.12 percent since December, 2015. (Government workers’ wages aren’t tracked by BLS, because they’re set largely by politicians’ decisions, not by market forces. Therefore, they tell us little about the economy’s fundamentals.)

And the new real wage figures add to the evidence – presented at RealityChek last month – that increases in such take-home pay adjusted for prices have slowed dramatically over the last year.

Here are the new numbers for all private sector workers:

February, 2014-15: +2.03 percent

February, 2015-16: +1.33 percent

February, 2016-17: 0 percent

And the new results for private sector production and non-supervisory workers:

February, 2014-15: +2.15 percent

February, 2015-16: +1.77 percent

February, 2016-17: -0.33 percent

Here are the figures for all manufacturing workers”

February, 2014-15: +1.33 percent

February, 2015-16: +1.32 percent

February, 2016-17: +0.09 percent

And finally, here are the new data for blue-collar manufacturing employees:

February, 2014-15: +1.90 percent

February, 2015-16: +1.75 percent

February, 2016-17: -0.57 percent

In fact, the only piece of good news in the new BLS report is that the January and February real wage figures are still preliminary. But unless they see unprecedented upward revisions, or constant dollar wages enjoy a strong rebound in the next few months, expect the real wage numbers to start turning up the political heat both for a Federal Reserve that’s apparently thinking “Mission Accomplished,” and a president apparently convinced that his mere election is speeding up the recovery.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Despite Strength in February, Manufacturing’s Jobs Recession Continued

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BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation adjusted wages, Jobs, manufacturing, non-farm payrolls, recession, recovery, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

February’s preliminary U.S. manufacturing jobs figures showed that the sector boosted payrolls by 28,000 – its best performance since the same total for January, 2016, but that its jobs recession continued, with employment down on net since that month. Manufacturing wage growth, moreover, showed some weakness, as average hourly pay improved by just 0.04 percent on month (lagging the overall private sector) and the yearly improvement of 2.89 percent was mediocre by the last few months’ standards.

The positive manufacturing jobs revisions for December and January brightened former President Obama’s record for employment creation in the sector, but the increase still fell short of his stated second term goal of creating one million new positions in industry by 625,000.

Despite the good February monthly advance – plus the sector’s first annual employment increase (7,000) since last July – manufacturing jobs as a share of the non-farm total hit a new record low of 8.49 percent. Nor did the February results change manufacturing’s status as an American employment and wages laggard. Since the mid-2009 onset of the current economic recovery, industry employment is up only 5.59 percent, versus the 11.28 percent for the nation as a whole, and pre-inflation wages have risen by 14.51 percent versus the 17.84 percent rise for the entire private sector.

Here’s my analysis of the latest monthly (February) manufacturing figures contained in this morning’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

>The first full (though preliminary) monthly tally of President Trump’s manufacturing job creation record showed that even a strong February – which saw industry’s payrolls grow by 28,000 on net – wasn’t enough to pull the sector out of its latest jobs recession.

>Although the February results were manufacturing’s best since January, 2016’s (which were identical), the sector’s employment is still below that month’s total by 5,000 on net.

>In addition, manufacturing wages displayed signs of weakness in February. Their pre-inflation sequential increase of 0.04 percent trailed that of the overall private sector (0.23 percent) for the second straight month.

>Year-on-year, however, manufacturing’s wage performance looks better. Hourly pay rose by 2.89 percent versus the 2.80 percent figure for the private sector. Manufacturing held the edge in January, too, but the gap was wider (2.89 percent versus 2.60 percent).

>The new Labor Department release also showed that former President Obama’s record as a manufacturing jobs creator was somewhat better than previously reported. Net new manufacturing jobs still rose much less (a total of 375,000) than the one million goal he set for his second term. But positive revisions for January and February boosted manufacturing positions by 13,000 during those years.

>The last three months’ totals also did nothing to halt the historic slide in manufacturing’s share of total non-farm employment. In February, this figure hit a new record low of 8.49 percent.

>On the brighter side, the February yearly manufacturing jobs increase of 7,000 was the first such advance since the 7,000 annual growth last July.  Nonetheless, it compared poorly with the 69,000 year-on-year gain reported for the previous Februarys.  

>Even so, manufacturing remains a jobs and wages laggard during the current economic recovery. Since the economy returned to expansion mode in June, 2009, industry employment is up by only 5.59 percent – less than half the 11.28 percent advance recorded by the private sector as a whole.

>Since its 2010 employment bottom, manufacturing has now regained 929,000 (40.51 percent) of the 2.293 million jobs it lost during the recession and its aftermath. By contrast, the private sector overall lost 8.801 million jobs from the recession’s December, 2007 onset through its February, 2010 absolute employment low. Since then, it has increased net employment by 16.217 million.

>Moreover, whereas total private sector employment is now 6.41 percent higher than at the recession’s beginning, in late 2007, manufacturing employment is still 9.92 percent lower.

>On the wage front, pre-inflation manufacturing pay has risen by 14.51 percent during this recovery – again slower than the 17.84 percent for the entire private sector.

>Adjusting for inflation, manufacturing’s wage performance looks much worse. The latest figures only cover January, but they show that real hourly pay in the sector is up only 0.65 percent since the recovery began in mid-2009 – more than seven years ago. Real wages in the private sector overall are up 3.39 percent.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Productivity as the Main Manufacturing Job Killer Debunked Again

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automation, BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor, Jobs, labor productivity, manufacturing, offshoring, productivity, Trade, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Here’s a curious phenomenon that America’s political leaders and media need to focus on more: Practitioners of what I call fakeonomics keep prattling on about how the nation’s trade policy has almost nothing to do with the woes of domestic manufacturing and its workers, and that more automation and other forms of productivity gains are almost entirely to blame. At the same time, the official (and most authoritative) data keep proving them wrong. Just look at the latest figures, from this morning’s government report on America’s labor productivity.

These figures – from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) – measure how many hours of human work it takes the U.S. economy to produce a given quantity of output. So although they don’t directly gauge the role being played by machines and software of all kinds in American industries (including manufacturing), they’re no doubt an excellent proxy for automation levels and how they’re changing. In other words, if labor productivity is rising at a respectable rate, then it’s reasonable to conclude that at least lots of job loss is indeed attributable to the adoption of labor-saving technologies – as opposed to more net imports or more job offshoring. And the opposite holds logically, too,

As I’ve written, BLS itself admits that its published numbers likely overstate labor productivity growth for the whole economy – and therefore, it would seem, the automation rate. But even leaving aside this flaw, the new numbers once again show that “respectable” is the last adjective that’s appropriate to describe improvement lately in this gauge of efficiency.

BLS’ new figures for the fourth quarter of 2016 and for that full calendar year incorporate comprehensive revisions going back to 2012. Given how many quarterly and annual figures have been updated, the most efficient way to show how miserable productivity growth has been recently, and how weakly it’s correlated with manufacturing employment, is to show how the previous figures for the last three economic recoveries before the new adjustment and after it. (As discussed before, comparing economic performance during similar phases of a business cycle – e.g., recoveries versus recoveries, or recessions versus recessions – is the best way to get apples-to-apples data.)

Here are the manufacturing employment and manufacturing labor productivity changes for the expansion of the 1990s (as presented in this previous post):

manufacturing employment: -0.38 percent

manufacturing labor productivity: +46.78 percent

And here are the results for the shorter expansion of the 2000s (taken from the same post):

manufacturing employment: -12.44 percent

manufacturing labor productivity: +41.08 percent

And here are the results reported in that post for the current expansion – which has been longer than that of the previous decades, but not quite as long as its 1990s predecessor:

manufacturing employment: +4.68 percent

manufacturing labor productivity: +22.88 percent.

Where do the new revisions leave us? Manufacturing employment is now up 5.24 percent. And the sector’s labor productivity is now up 22.70 percent. In other words, it’s productivity growth has been slightly weaker than previously estimated – when it was already historically lousy.

It’s hard to escape the obvious conclusion: It’s high time for globalization cheerleaders to stop letting trade off the hook for major manufacturing job loss – and transition to work that’s actually productive.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Inflated Claims of Real Wage Inflation

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BLS, blue-collar workers, Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation, inflation-adjusted wages, labor market, private sector, productivity, recession, recovery, wages, workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy

This morning’s real wage figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) once again vividly remind us how important baselines are in measuring economic trends and evaluating their strengths. They just as vividly underscore the importance of overall inflationary and deflationary trends in the economy in calculating these wage data – which especially over the short term have nothing to do with workers’ genuine earnings, bargaining power, and success in keeping up with living standards. To me, the bottom line for these latest (January, 2016) numbers is that real wages in America continue to go nowhere.

BLS reported today that inflation-adjusted wages for the entire private sector rose by 0.38 percent month-on-month – the best sequential advance since August’s virtually identical reading. (Government workers aren’t measured here because their pay is determined overwhelmingly by politicians’ decisions, not fundamental labor market conditions.)

Moreover, the December monthly constant dollar wage improvement was revised up from 0.09 percent to 0.19 percent. As a result, the December year-on-year (and full-year 2015) figure increased from 1.82 percent to 2.01 percent. That’s the best such performance since 2008 – when many employers facing a strengthening recession were quickly shedding less experienced, lower-paid workers and therefore statistically pushing real wages way up.

Yet the new January number (which, like December’s, is still preliminary), means that January, 2015-January, 2016 after-inflation wage increases totaled only 1.14 percent. That’s much lower than 2014-2015’s 2.43 percent, but much higher than the previous 0.39 percent advance. In fact, the most recent January-January increase was the biggest such improvement 2009’s 3.70 percent – which was also boosted by the aforementioned recession-era downsizing strategy.

At the same time, here’s where those problematic economy-wide inflation data come in. January, 2015 was one heck of an unusual inflation month. Sequentially, core prices fell then by 0.64 percent. That’s the biggest drop by far since December, 2008, when the financial crisis was peaking and the economy seemed about to fall off a cliff. The harsh winter weather at the end of 2014 and the start of 2015 was clearly a big reason, and it has major effects on all comparisons based on January, 2015.

Another problem with this (and previous) January data: As I’ve previously noted, lots of state and local minimum wage hikes have kicked in during those months. These government-mandated decisions have as little bearing on labor market conditions as the government’s own pay levels.

So my own preference is to look over the longer term, and in particular, to compare real wage trends among recent economic recoveries – which provides the best apples-to-apples data. Unfortunately, BLS creates a problem here. Its figures on inflation-adjusted wages for all private sector workers only go back to March, 2006. So they can reveal what’s happened to these wages since the current recovery began – in June, 2009. (They’re up in toto by 3.39 percent.) But they can’t tell us what happened in previous recoveries.

One way to address the problem is to use BLS’ figures for production and non-supervisory private sector workers. This is of course a different group than all workers, but the data here go back to 1964, and these “blue collar” Americans currently make up more than 82 percent of the entire private sector workforce. As a result, they’re pretty representative.

During the current recovery, price-adjusted wages for this large group of U.S. workers is up 3.85 percent – a faster rate than that for all workers. And it’s a much faster rate than for the previous, bubble-era recovery (which was only a little shorter). Then, real blue-collar wages inched up by only 0.35 percent. Wages during this expansion are up less than during its 1990s counterpart (6.64 percent), And that’s the case even factoring in their different durations. That “Clinton boom” lasted nearly ten years – about one and a half times longer than the current expansion. But real wages advanced by nearly twice as much.

During all these expansions, real blue-collar wages have performed better than during the so-called Reagan recovery of the 1980s. During that expansion, which like the current recovery also lasted about six and one half years, these wages actually fell by 1.86 percent. Even though the significant expansion preceding the Reagan recovery was much shorter – lasting from only March, 1975 to the end of 1979 – inflation-adjusted blue-collar wages sank even faster – 3.19 percent. Then, of course, inflation was at recent historic highs.

Therefore, the current recovery looks pretty good, real wage-wise. But there’s one other expansion we can examine – that during the 1960s. Data for the entire upswing, which ran from February, 1961 through November, 1969, isn’t available from BLS. But between January, 1964, when the numbers begin, through the expansion’s end, inflation-adjusted non-supervisory wages shot up by 8.58 percent. No wonder this period is seen as a Golden Age by many of those old enough to remember it firsthand.

Two other developments also take much of the shine off today’s wage growth. First, the current expansion is getting long in the tooth, and thus it’s unclear how much more inflation-adjusted wages will rise going forward. And second, despite the big real wage increases of the 1960s, America’s productivity was rising much faster than today as well. So “let the buyer beware” still seems like good advice for information consumers today when confronted with claims of worrisome wage inflation.