(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The New U.S. Inflation Figures Still Look Pretty Transitory to Me

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hotels, inflation adjusted wages, labor shortage, leisure and hospitality, non-supervisory workers, private sector, production workers, real wages, restaurants, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Today’s official U.S. inflation figures made it somewhat more difficult to argue that the recent strong price increases recorded in the American economy are “transitory,” as the Federal Reserve and many observers (like me) have been claiming. But they don’t make these contentions that much harder, and that goes at least double for warnings about rampant wage inflation – which today’s related real wage figures debunk in an especially powerful way.

At the same time, the price surges that have taken place deserve to be emphasized in another, generaly neglected sense: However temporary, they represent another cost of the unprecedentedly powerful and not-surprisingly chaotic, bottleneck-ridden U.S. economic reopening – and one that’s followed unprecedentedly sudden CCP Virus-related lockdowns that in retrospect look to have been needlessly sweeping because the pandemic’s worst health effects were so highly concentrated among vulnerable groups like the elderly.

The most troubling development revealed in the new inflation report was the May-June acceleration in price increases overall – from 0.74 percent to 0.88 percent. That was indeed the largest monthly rise in absolute terms since June, 2008 (1.05 percent). But that May figure represented a deceleration from April’s 0.92 percent. So it looks way too early to claim that we’re seeing even the start of one of the most dangerous threats posed by inflation – a pickup in its momentum created by cost rises in various parts of the economy fueling efforts in other sectors to compensate with price increases in a process that eventually ripples widely, and with lasting effects, as in the 1970s.

(As with previous posts, I’m not too concerned with the year-on-year comparisons, since pricing trends in lockdown-y 2020 were so – artificially – weak.)

More evidence for the transitory faction: Leading the price increase charge in June were products and services like used cars and trucks (up 10.5 percent month-to-month), vehicle rentals (up 5.2 percent), and hotel and motel rates (up 7.9 percent). The first is a clear result of the stop-start nature of the economy during the pandemic period (see here for a cogent explanation), and the second and third just as obviously spring from the cabin fever-spurred burst of vacation travel in which Americans are engaged with the arrival of summer and the waning of the virus.  

Even in sectors like these, moreover, signs of weakening inflation can be seen. For example, the monthly rate of hotel and motel inflation was much higher than May’s 0.4 percent. But it was lower than April’s 8.8 percent. As for airline fares, their monthly price increases have fallen from 10.2 percent in April to seven percent in May to 2.7 percent in June.

As for wages – they keep falling in real terms in most of the economy. That is, they’re rising more slowly than inflation for goods and services. According to this morning’s data (which also cover June), after-inflation wages both for all private sector workers and for private sector production and other non-supervisory employees fell sequentially for the sixth straight month. And for both groups, the monthly June declines (0.53 percent for the former, 0.62 percent for the latter), were the biggest in roughly a year (June for the former, July for the latter).

(As known by RealityChek regulars, the U.S. government doesn’t track real or pre-inflation wages in the public sector because pay levels there are determined largely by politicians’ decisions, and therefore say relatively little about the status of the labor market.)

These new June wage figures are even more striking because the declines last year stemmed largely from businesses letting go less of experienced and usually therefore lower-paid staff as the economic outlook remained highly uncertain, and pushing up the average pay levels of remaining employees even though actual raises were rarely handed out.

It’s true that real wage increases continued in June in the leisure and hospitality super-category – whose eating and drinking establishments and hotels and motels and resorts were hit so hard during the peak pandemic months. But the June sequential increase for all employees in this sector inched up at the lowest rate (just under 0.15 percent) since January (just over 0.15 percent).

Leisure and hospitality production and non-supervisory workers fared better last month – their constant dollar wages rose by 1.16 percent, a big speed up from May’s 0.50 percent. But the April (1.87 percent) and February (1.21 percent) hourly inflation-adjusted pay hikes were stronger still. So again, it seems awfully premature to talk about raging wage inflation even here.

Moreover, there’s an important difference within leisure and hospitality between real wages in the restaurants etc sector and those in the hotels etc sector. Specifically, the latter have been growing faster for production and non-supervisory employees – and especially for June alone (0.94 percent versus 0.52 percent).  

The January-June results are even more striking for these service workers as a whole, since during this period, real wages for their counterparts in the overall private sector are actually down 1.83 percent.

Good luck to you if you believe these numbers describe a crisis-level national labor shortage, or even close.  And as I see it, it’s nearly as much of a stretch to argue on the basis of these hot June numbers that comparably hot inflation is here to stay.   

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Latest Data Remain Full of Normalization Puzzles

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Biden, CCP Virus, China, construction, coronavirus, COVID 19, Donald Trump, exports, goods trade, imports, inflation, inflation adjusted wages, labor shortages, leisure and hospitality, lockdowns, manufacturing, metals, non-oil goods trade deficit, non-supervisory workers, private sector, real wages, reopening, retail, services trade, shutdowns, tariffs, Trade, Trade Deficits, transportation, wage inflation, wages, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

While I was away for a few days last week, two major U.S. government reports came out both giving off conflicting signals on on whether the economy has started to return to normal in critical ways as the CCP Virus subsides and reopening, along with consequent changes in consumer behavior, proceed.

The monthly trade figures (for April) showed a sequential decline, following a record surge, in America’s chronically huge gap between exports and much larger amounts of imports. Moreover the monthly drop took place as economic growth sped along at unusual rates after being shut down by government mandates and consumer caution. So maybe they’re an early sign that a return to immediate pre-virus conditions has begun?

Or is their most important message that these deficits, and especially the import levels, are still hovering near all-time highs in (the most widely followed) pre-inflation terms even though the economy as of the latest (first quarter) numbers is still a bit smaller in (the most widely followed) inflation-adjusted terms than during the last full pre-pandemic quarter (the fourth quarter of 2019)?

Indeed, the deficits are gargantuan even though President Biden has left former President Trump’s substantial tariffs on metals and goods from China practically untouched. 

The monthly inflation numbers (for May) are similarly confusing. They revealed that consumer prices (just one inflation measure published by Washington, but an important one) rose by 4.93 percent in seasonally adjusted terms. That was their fastest annual pace since September, 2008’s 4.95 percent. Surely, as widely claimed (including by the Federal Reserve, which wields so much influence over the economy, this upswing stems from a combination of bottlenecks resulting from (1) the sudden, widespread reopening; (2) the unusually low overall inflation numbers generated a year ago, when the economy was near the depths of its viruts- and shutdown-induced slump; and (3) the immense dose of stimulus injected into the economy by both elected politicians and the unelected Fed.

At the same time, the Fed has told us that its stimulus isn’t ending anytime soon, and although the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats are displaying some cold feet about approving more such levels of economic fuel (e.g., in the form of outlays on infrastructure, and a wide variety of income supports and enhanced unemployment benefits), it’s difficult to imagine that most or even much of this spending will actually be withdrawn even once a post-virus recovery is an indisputable reality.

But the biggest surprise of all: Despite the economy-wide inflation pressures, and by-now-routine claims that employers are dealing with nearly crippling labor shortages, wages overall adjusted for inflation keep going down.

Compounding the confusion over whatever conclusions can legitimately be drawn from these two reports: They cover two different months.

But let’s begin with the most important details from the April trade report. The ambiguity embodied in the data begins with the total deficit figure. The record March result was revised up from $74.45 billion to $75.03 billion but April’s $68.90 shortfall for goods and services combined, though the second worst monthly figure ever, was 8.17 percent smaller. That’s the biggest sequential drop since February, 2020 (8.39 percent), when China’s export-heavy economy was still largely closed because of the virus.

The same holds for the goods trade gap. The record March figure was revised up, too, from $91.56 billion to $92.86 billion. But April’s $86.68 billion result represented a 6.65 percent monthly decline, and this falloff was the biggest since the 8.39 percent plunge of January, 2019 – when American businesses were still adjusting both to Trump’s tariffs and anticipated tariffs.

Also still fueling the high U.S. deficits – a worsening of services trade balances. Here, U.S. trade has long been in surplus, but the surpluses keep shrinking because service sectors like travel are still suffering from the pandemic’s arrival and the consequent decimation of travel and othe transportation in particular. In fact, the April figure of $17.78 billion was the lowest since September, 2012’s $18.62 billion.

One key set of trade flows does, however, provide some evidence of Trump tariff effectiveness – U.S. non-oil goods trade, which encompasses those exports and imports whose magnitudes are most heavily influenced by trade policy (because, as known by RealityChek regulars, trade in oil is almost never the subject of any trade policy decisions and services trade liberalization remains at very early stages). In April, the monthly shortfall retreated 4.16 percent from its March record of $90.12 billion to $86.37 billion – which is only the fourth highest such total ever.

The import figures I focused on last month exhibit the same overall patterns: April saw big drops from record levels but the absolute numbers remain distressingly high. March’s initially reported record $274.48 billion in total imports was revised up considerably – to $277.69 billion. April’s total of $273.89 billion represented a 1.37 percent drop, but nonetheless was the second worst such figure on record.

March’s record monthly goods import figure was upgraded, too – from $234.44 billion to $236.52 billion. April’s total of $231.97 billion was a 1.92 percent drop but these purchases also still represented the second highest of alll time.

As for non-oil goods imports, the $215.33 billion April total was 1.98 percent down from an upwardly revised record $219.68 billion, and also the second biggest ever. Biggest drop since last April’s 10.91

Whether normalization is returning in manufacturing is more difficult to tell. Imports in March hit a record $207.59 billion, and did drop by 4.59 percent sequentially to $198.06 billion in April. That decrease, however, was a typical monthly move for manufacturing imports, and the April figure was still the third highest ever.

Incidentally, the April manufacturing deficit of $103.60 billion was 4.64 percent lower than March’s $108.66 billion. The March total was the second highest on record, but April’s figure was only the seventh all-time worst. The record, $110.20 billion, came last October, and it’s notable that the gap has narrowed on net despite the resilience shown during the pandemic period by manufacturing output.

More evidence of the Trump tariffs’ impact comes from the data on goods trade with China – whose products have attracted nearly all of these levies, and that cover hundreds of billions of dollars worth of products. The April figure of $37.59 billion was 6.56 percent lower than its March predecessor – a thoroughly unexceptional sequential decline and monthly level by historical standards. But the monthly dropoff was consideraby greater than the aforementioned 1.98 percent decrease for non-oil goods – the closest global proxy.

As a result of all these inconclusive developments, I’ll be awaiting the May trade report with even more interest than usual.

But despite all the uncertainties I mentioned at the start of this post, those May inflation figures have made me more confident than before in my previous contention that current price surges are anomalies by the extremely low inflation generated by the CCP Virus-battered economy of a year ago, and by the sudden reopening of so much of the economy following the long shutdowns and lockdowns. Even clearer, as I see it: Claims of significant, troubling wage inflation are especially weak.

After all, that 4.93 percent year-on-year May price increase followed a previous May-to-May rise that was just 0.22 percent. That was the feeblest such rise since September, 2015’s 0.13 percent. In addition, May’s month-to-month 0.64 price advance was smaller than April’s 0.77 percent. Two months do not a trend make, but these numbers certainly don’t point to raging inflation fires.

Nor do the wage data. Otherwise after-inflation total private sector wages wouldn’t be down more on-month in May (-0.18 percent) than in April (-0.09 percent). And the same couldn’t be said of constant dollar wages for non-supervisory workers (-0.20 percent in May versus flat in April).

Getting more granular, the price-adjusted wage trends are as bad or worse in construction; trade, transportation and utilities overall; retail trade; and education and health services.

The two big exceptions: the leisure and hospitality workforces that have been so decimated by the virus (and especially the non-supervisory group) and the transportation and warehousing sub-sector of the transportation and utilities industry category that contains a trucking sector unusually strained by the rapid reopening. In both cases, however, (and especially the leisure and hospitality industry), inflation-adjusted wages in absolute terms are well below the national private sector average. If anything, therefore, it seems like some wage inflation for these workers is long overdue.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Wage Inflation? Seriously?

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CCP Virus, construction, coronavirus, COVID 19, housing, inflation, inflation-adjusted wages, labor shortages, leisure and hospitality, private sector, real wages, recession, recovery, wage inflation, wages, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Reports keep abounding that U.S. businesses can’t find enough workers to match their needs amid an ongoing rapid reopening of the economy from its lockdowns-induced slump, and that companies are therefore being forced to attract employees with ever higher – and even alarmingly higher – pay offers.

All of that makes perfect sense except for one critical detail: The official U.S. wage figures show precious few signs of soaring wages whatever. In fact, when you adjust for the inflation that has been recorded in Washington’s statistics, you see that workers’ hourly pay generally keeps falling behind, not racing ahead, of rising prices in the economy.

First let’s look at the pre-inflation figures for the entire economy (except for government, where pay levels mainly reflect politicians’ choices, not economic fundamentals).

When it comes to the entire private sector, hourly earnings in April (the latest figures available, which are still preliminary) grew by 0.33 percent year-on-year. That result, though, is somewhat misleading, since the previous April’s level was artificially high. That month, remember, was the depth of the CCP Virus-induced recession, and companies were largely laying off their least experienced (and cheapest) staffers. So the wage number for retained workers rose (and strongly) simply because their pay levels remained relatively lofty, and they accounted for a much bigger percentage of employment. Therefore, perhaps that misleadingly high April, 2020 figure was the main reason that the 2020-2021 improvement is misleadingly low?

Unfortunately, the data shoot down that hypothesis, too. For example, between “normal” April, 2018 and 2019, economy-wide pre-inflation wages jumped by 3.30 percent. That’s ten times the 2020-2021 increase. And in fact, the April, 2019 to 2020 pay hike was by far the smallest since 2006 (when this particular data series began).

But maybe the biggest wage inflation only began this calendar year – when overall inflationary pressures have arguably become visible?  Between January and April, current dollar hourly wages for the entire U.S. private sector did climb by 0.84 percent, and that advance was more than twice as fast as the April year-on-year change. Moreover, this 2021 wage growth was faster than that for “normal” January-April, 2019 (0.76 percent). Indeed, it was the fastest since 2008, another recessionary year when layoffs heavily concentrated among the least experienced, lowest-paid employees rendered the 0.90 percent result artificially high.

But aside from 2008, the January-April increase wasn’t that much higher than that seen in many recent years. For example, the January-April result for “normal” 2019 was 0.76 percent. For 2018, it was 0.71 percent. Just as important – does anyone think that those years, or any time lately, has been a golden age of wage increases?

There’s another possibility to consider: that strong wage inflation has taken place only among the production and other non-management workers, who both tend to be the lowest-paid and who in principle therefore are likeliest to be kept out of the job market by unusually generous unemployment benefits.

Average hourly earnings before inflation for this group have actually risen much more strongly year-on-year in April than for the overall workforce – by 1.15 percent versus 0.33 percent. And this 2020-2021 result, as with wages for the entire workforce, does seem to have been artificially depressed by the equally artificially high (7.84 percent!) figure for 2019-2020.

But historically, the 2020-21 wage increase not only looks anything but exceptional. It’s positively pitiful – by far the weakest April-April rise on record. Just to compare, from April to April in “normal” 2019 and 2018, current dollar wages for these “blue collar” workers were up 3.46 percent and 2.83 percent, respectively. .

Are the trends much different for January-April periods – which in principle should reveal whether wage inflation has waited till this calendar year to take off? For 2020 so far, pre-inflation blue collar hourly pay has improved by 1.23 percent – more than the 0.84 percent increase for all private sector workers.

That’s much slower than the comparable 5.36 percent jump last year, but we agree that last year was weird. The 2021 results are faster than those of normal 2019 (0.91 percent), but the gap doesn’t seem gargantuan to me. At the same time, current dollar January-April pay increases of one percent or greater for blue collar workers have been experienced five times since 1998, and before then, you need to go back to the late-1980s for a period when they were routine.

So describing the January-April, 2021 results as wage inflation-y could be justified. But that’s a far cry from reasonably concluding that this inflation will have much in the way of legs, since the economy, as widely noted, has never seen this kind of sudden stop-start transition in peacetime.

There’s another set of numbers, though, that needs to be examined to put the wage inflation issue in full perspective – recent wage changes after taking into account inflation across the entire economy. And in these real terms, hourly pay has actually been going down lately.

That’s true for all private sector workers between last April and this past April (down 3.66 percent).

It’s true for these workers between January and April of this year (down 0.88 percent).

It’s true for private sector blue collar workers between last April and this past April (down 3.37 percent).

And it’s true for these workers between January and April of this year (-0.71 percent).

Moreover, the “2020 effect” caused by that year’s artificially high baseline doesn’t seem to account fully for this wage deterioration. It’s definitely been apparent for all private workers (for whom average real wages soared by 7.81 percent between 2019 and 2020), and for private sector blue collar workers (whose inflation-adjusted average hourly pay surged by 7.68 percent).

In addition, since 2006, (when real wages for the whole private sector workforce began to be tracked), these wages have fallen on an April-April basis five other times. But they’ve never fallen by remotely as much as in 2021. And this year, employers are supposed to be desperate for workers. Much the same holds for private sector blue collar workers during this period.

Looking at the January-April periods, the 2021 decrease of 0.88 percent for all private sector workers is the second biggest since 2006 (trailing only 2011’s 0.97 percent). Further, this four-month stretch has only seen one other instance of constant dollar wage decrease (2019’s 0.37 percent). And the 2021 result is all the more strange given the strangely strong and sudden nature of the recovery.

When it comes to their blue collar counterparts, 2021’s 0.71 percent drop in after-inflation wages between January and April is also the second biggest since 2006 (trailing only the 1.24 percent fall-off suffered, again, in 2011). Pay declines during this period for these workers has been more frequent than for the private sector overall. (They’ve occurred five times all told before 2021.) Again, however, 2021’s has been puzzlingly steep given the economy’s unusually fast recovery this year and all the labor shortage claims that have resulted.

More convincing signs of out-of-the-ordinary wage inflation can be seen in sectors like construction and leisure and hospitality, especially during the first four months of this year. In the former, which has enjoyed strength in residential housing throughout the pandemic period, pre-inflation wages have increased by 1.24 percent. That’s the most since 2006 (again, the earliest data available) – though not outlandishly so. But after accounting for inflation, real construction wages have dropped by 0.49 percent between January and April of this year.

For blue collar construction workers, pre-inflation wages have improved by 1.75 percent during the first four months of 2021 – another post-2006 high. But even though their real wages have dipped during this period by only 0.17 percent, that’s still a dip.

The leisure and hospitality industries are of course coming out of a disastrous pandemic period, and with Americans now flocking to restaurants and bars and resuming travel, it’s not surprising that January-April current dollar hourly pay has risen by 3.71 percent – far and away a post-2006 record. The post-inflation number is up nicely, too (1.98 percent), and also a performance that’s smashed previous records. So this sector so far is telling a stronger wage inflation story.

Non-supervisory blue collar leisure and hospitality workers have fared even better, with pre-inflation wages zooming up by 5.87 percent between January and April of this year, and real hourly pay better by 3.98 percent.

Will these healthy pay hikes continue? That’s a big question for these parts of the economy. But even though wage figures don’t capture the entire compensation picture (in particular, they leave out non-wage benefits and all the signing bonuses employers are reportedly offering to lure workers off the sidelines), with wage and salary income representing more than 80 percent of total employee compensation throughout the economy (including in the public sector), they capture lots of the picture. And the overall message is that, like a famous economist once said about computers being everywhere but in the productivity statistics, wage inflation worth worrying about, and related worker shortage claims, to date are everywhere but in the wage statistics.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: More Reopening, Not Endless Money, is Now the Best Jobs Strategy

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African Americans, American Rescue Plan, Biden, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Covid relief, education, Employment, Federal Reserve, Hispanics, hotels, Jerome Powell, Jobs, Latinos, leisure and hospitality, lockdowns, recovery, restaurants, shutdown, stay-at-home, stimulus package, unemployment, wages, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

There’s no doubt that the American jobs market has suffered an out-and-out disaster since it got hit by the CCP Virus and the follow-on lockdowns and other restrictions. There’s also no doubt that many workers and their families are still suffering greatly, and will need government aid to make it to the Other Side, and the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan legislation that the President will likely sign into law soon will help fill this gap.

Plenty of doubt remains, however, about whether all, or close to all, of the massive funds approved in this measure are actually needed to cure the economy’s remaining employment woes, and one of the main reasons is the nature of the jobs blow that’s been delivered. Because it’s been so heavily concentrated in the country’s leisure and hospitality industries (encompassing eateries and drinking places of all kinds, plus hotels and motels, and entertainment and cultural venues), it’s entirely possible that nowadays, the most effective way to fix the jobs market fastest would be to lift the lockdowns and other mandated curbs that have fallen so hard on sectors that depend on serving in-person customers.

The case for relying on a virus-relief/stimulus package this big, at this stage of the economy’s recovery from its pandemic-induced recession, has been eloquently stated by President Biden and by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The former warned just before the legislation passed that the U.S. economy “still has 9.5 million fewer jobs than it had this time last year. And at that rate, it would take two years to get us back on track.”

The latter has stated that he won’t be satisfied that full employment has returned until he sees what one reporter has called “broad-based gains in employment, and not just in the aggregate or at the median.” As a result, the Fed Chair is paying particular attention to (the reporter’s words again) “Black unemployment, wage growth for low-wage workers and labor force participation for those without college degrees, categories that historically have taken longer to recover from downturns than broader metrics.”

But it’s precisely these less fortunate portions of the workforce that would be helped disproportionately – and then some – by focusing on reopening steps that would surely affect the leisure and hospitality industries just as disproportionately.

If you doubt the importance of leisure and hospitality job loss over the last year in terms of overall U.S. jobs loss, here’s what you need to know. Of the 8.068 million positions shed by the country’s private sector between last Februrary (the final month of pre-CCP Virus normality for the American economy), fully 3.451 million have come in the leisure and hospitality industries. That’s nearly 43 percent.

Put differently, during that final normal economic month, leisure and hospitality workers represented just 13.04 percent of all private sector workers. Yet their employment plunge was more than three times as great relatively speaking.

Moreover, leisure and hospitality’s progress in getting back to pre-pandemic square one has been slower than that of the private sector overall. Since the April employment trough, leisure and hospitality has regained 4.955 million of the 8.224 million jobs lost during the worst of the pandemic, or 60.25 percent. For the private sector in toto, 13.267 million of the 21.353 million jobs lost in March and April have come back since – 62.13 percent.

It’s also clear that many of the kinds of workers about which Fed Chair Powell has been most concerned are concentrated in leisure and hospitality. For example, in 2019, (America’s last pre-CCP Virus full year), 13.1 percent of these sectors’ workers were African American versus 12.3 percent for the entire U.S. economy (including government workers at all levels), and 24 percent were Hispanic or Latino versus 17.6 percent for the entire economy.

Leisure and hospitality companies tend to employ Americans with low levels of formal education, too. According to the Labor Department, in 2019, 79.9 percent of the nation’s “first-line supervisors of house-keeping and janitorial workers” 25 years and older lack even an associate’s degree, and 76 percent of their food preparation and service counterparts fall into this category. The shares are even higher for the workers they supervise. Meanwhile, only 51.5 percent of all U.S. workers haven’t taken their education beyond high school.

Not surprisingly, therefore, leisure and hositality jobs pay poorly. In February, 2020, just before the arrivals of the pandemic and the lockdowns, their average hourly wages were only 59.28 percent those of all private sector workers. Last month, this figure had fallen to 57.58 percent. (See Table B-3 here.) 

For most of the pandemic period, the U.S. government at all levels pursued a mitigation strategy that aimed mainly at curbing economic and other forms of human activity across-the-board. Now, even with vaccinations and growing population-wide immunity showing strong signs of bringing the pandemic under control, the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress are just as determined to stimulate the economy that’s still significantly shut down by with an American Rescue Plan that seems just as indiscriminate.

As I’ve been writing (see, e.g., here), it should have been clear since late last spring that the anti-virus fight would have much more effective (and less harmful to the economy and other dimensions of public health) had it targeted protecting especially vulnerable populations. I strongly suspect that, with the fullness of time, it will become just as clear that a stimulus and jobs strategy emphasizing accelerating reopening, and thus aiding sectors and workers hardest hit by the remaining shutdowns, will prove a much more effective employment cure than the indiscriminate spending approach on which Washington has just doubled down.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Another Sign of Wage Stagnation – from the Job Turnover Numbers

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Employment, Great Recession, Jobs, JOLTS, Labor Department, leisure and hospitality, non-farm jobs, professional and business services, recovery, retail, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Since the economy has been moving for quite a while now to full employment (at least as conventionally measured), I haven’t been monitoring the Labor Department’s data on job turnover (the “JOLTS” figures, per the acronym of its official label) as in years past. But yesterday I checked out the numbers reported yesterday morning, and see that this lapse has been shortsighted.

For the JOLTS data are still confirming that the purportedly red-hot, super-tight U.S. labor market is still under-performing according to a key measure – wages. Indeed, the new JOLTS numbers (for November) offer one important explanation: The job openings being advertised by businesses in low-wage industries are outgrowing those in better paying sectors.

The best way to show this trend is to look at the share of total non-farm jobs (the Labor Department’s U.S. employment universe) at key recent points in the business cycle that have been comprised of low-wage jobs, and compare them with the job openings figures at those times.

To remind RealityChek regulars and clue in others, my proxy for low-wage jobs consists of the retail sector, the leisure and hospitality sector, and the big low-wage portion of the professional and business services sector (e.g., janitorial services, landscaping services, call centers, bill-collection services, security services, and the like).

As of November, the hourly wages for these sectors, respectively, were (without adjusting for inflation) $18.28, $15.60, and $20.05. For the private sector as a whole, the hourly wage that month was $26.54.

When the Great Recession broke out, at the end of 2007, these parts of the economy combined represented 26.81 percent of total non-farm employment. When it ended, in the middle of 2009, this share had dropped only to 26.23 percent (by 2.16 percent) – even as overall payrolls dropped by 5.34 percent.

Since then, the low-wage share of all U.S. jobs has risen to 27.74 percent. And the JOLTS data tell the same story – especially during the ongoing recovery.

When the recession began, and low-wage jobs were 26.81 percent of total non-farm employment, they represented 31.94 percent of the job openings advertised by American employers.

During the recession, they were actually in less demand, in absolute and relative terms. In June, 2009, with low-wage jobs accounting for 26.23 percent of the total, such positions represented just 28.38 percent of total job openings. (My figure for the low-wage professional and business services positions is based on their share of jobs in that sector for the month in question. It isn’t broken out in the official JOLTS reports.)   

The results for last November (again, the latest available)? Low-wage jobs had grown as a share of total non-farm employment to 27.74 percent. But as a share of job openings, they had risen much higher – to 34.53 percent.

So because wage lag is still such a prominent feature of the American economy, I’m back on the JOLTS case. When the quality of job opportunities in the labor market starts showing sustained improvement, we’ll have grounds for believing that the long national nightmare of stagnant wages is ending.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Key Employment Report was a Bit Better Than it Looked

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Employment, Federal Reserve, hiring, Janet Yellen, Jobs, JOLTS, leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, real private sector, retail, subsidized private sector, turnover, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’m steadily getting less convinced that the Labor Department’s monthly JOLTS report is such a great measure of the job market’s health any more. After all, one of the main trends tracked in this data series on turnover on the employment scene is job openings – which have been very strong lately. At the same time, it’s getting clearer and clearer that many businesses are getting ridiculously picky in their actual hiring, so the gap between the positions they say are available and jobs they are actually likely to create keeps getting wider and wider.  (Businesses, for their part, insist that the labor market isn’t supplying the workers they want.)  

Nonetheless, it’s one of the favorite labor market indicators of Fed Chair Janet Yellen, (a leading labor economist) and therefore is crucial to the central bank’s decisions to raise (or, at some point, re-lower) interest rates. So since the tightness or easiness of credit clearly bears on employment levels, and the entire economy’s performance, ignore the JOLTS findings at your peril!

August’s results came out on Friday – when yours truly was tied up with personal matters – but it’s worth noting that they broke a pretty reliable recent pattern: The headline figure on job openings was a good deal worse than one crucial internal figure. As always, the internals speak volumes on job quality.

Overall nonfarm openings fell by 5.27 percent month-to-month from July levels. The latter total admittedly was the latest in a series of new monthly records set recently, but the drop-off was the biggest proportionately since July, 2012. The story was similar, though not quite as ominous, in the private sector. The August openings decrease of 5.08 percent – also from a new record July level – was only the steepest since last September. These August findings could improve, as they are still preliminary. But September’s (also still preliminary) monthly jobs report was so dreary that upcoming JOLTS reports could feature even weaker openings numbers.

The good news concerned the share of openings announced in the economy’s lowest wage sectors. This figure can be estimated by taking two hard numbers (openings in the retail and leisure and hospitality sector) and adding to them a softer number (openings in the lower-wage segments of the overall high-wage professional and business services category). These less lucrative positions accounted for 42.91 percent of total August employment in that larger services grouping, so I (not unreasonably) assume that they generated the same share of openings.

At the onset of the last recession, in December, 2007, total low-wage job openings came to 30.46 percent of all openings. By the time the recovery technically began, in June, 2009, this number shrank to 29.48 percent. This August, it was up to 33.09 percent, reinforcing claims that the strong jobs recovery during the current economic expansion has featured too much low-quality job creation. But the latest August numbers – again, which are still preliminary – were a bit lower than the previous August’s 33.52 percent. Two cheers! 

Somewhat more discouraging was the continued prominence of openings in the subsidized private sector of the economy versus the “real” private sector. The former include industries like healthcare services, whose vigor (including job opportunities) depend heavily on government subsidies. As a result, because that portion of the private sector whose fortunes rise and fall due mainly to market forces generates most of America’s productivity growth and innovation, an excessively strong subsidized private sector can throw off assessments of the economy’s real strength and prospects.

When the last recession began, more than seven years ago, the subsidized private sector generated 17.74 percent of all reported job openings. That number jumped to 21.98 percent by the June, 2009 technical start of the recovery, because healthcare was virtually the only remaining employment game in town for America. As the real private sector recovered, subsidized private sector job openings retreated – back to 17.91 percent of the total by August, 2014. (This figure was still higher than when the recession began.) This August’s (still preliminary) estimate has it rebounding to 18,49 percent. And given those poor September overall job-creation totals, the subsidized portion of the private sector could look even more dominant when that month’s JOLTS report comes out.

Again, the JOLTS reports don’t tell us everything we need to know about the American employment scene. But since the Fed takes them so seriously, you should, too. How, though, will the central bankers interpret these new results? Outside Fed HQ, only a mind-reader could possibly know.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The New JOLTS Data Flunk the Job Quality Test

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administrative and support services, Employment, job openings, job quality, Jobs, JOLTS, leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, recovery, retail, subsidized private sector, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you’re into quantity over quality, you’ll agree with the apparent consensus this morning that the just-released Labor Department JOLTS report was good news – and could put pressure on Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen to raise interest rates at the central bank’s meeting this month, since it’s one of her favorite measures of labor market health. If you rank quality higher, you’ll have real doubts, for the new statistics on turnover in the labor force make clear that the American jobs market keeps morphing into an ever lower-wage jobs market.

Quantity-wise, the JOLTS report was indeed a winner, showing openings for a record 5.753 million employment opportunities in July – an all-time monthly high. But an unusually large share of these job openings came in anything but the kinds of positions any responsible parent would want their child to choose for a career. I can’t say that this is a record (that would take lots of numbers crunching) but fully 34.09 percent of the openings were in the low-wage sectors of retail, leisure and hospitality, and a low-paying sub-sector of the professional and business services category called administrative and support services. (See last month’s JOLTS post for more info on this latter group of service jobs.)

But I can say that this low-wage share of the latest monthly job openings number (all the July data are preliminary) is higher than its June counterpart – which itself was revised upward from 32.79 percent to 33.14 percent. It’s higher than the level from a year ago (32.09 percent). It’s higher than its level when the current recovery technically began, in June, 2009 (29.48 percent). And it’s higher than where it was when the last recession began, in December, 2007 (30.46 percent).

I completely agree that for a great many reasons, any job is better than no job at all. But shouldn’t an advanced economy like America’s that’s more than six years into an economic recovery be creating better and better job opportunities for its population, not worse and worse?

The lone development that arguably could pass for good news in the JOLTS report is the dip in the share of job openings in the government-subsidized private sector – industries like healthcare services, where levels of demand and employment largely stem from politicians’ decisions, not market forces. Such openings represented 17.96 percent of all openings in July – down pretty significantly from an 18.82 percent June figure that itself was revised down from 18.86 percent.

Even better, this preliminary July figure is also lower than last July’s 18.11 percent, and way down from the 21.98 percent level it hit when the recovery began, and healthcare hiring was the only part of the jobs market showing any life at all. But the government-subsidized private sector generated only 17.74 percent of new job openings at the last recession’s December, 2007 onset, indicating that, again, six-plus years into a recovery, even on the quantity side, the “real” private sector still isn’t pulling the job-creation weight that a truly vibrant economy needs.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why it’s a Larry David Jobs Recovery

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administrative and support services, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Employment, Jobs, Larry David, leisure and hospitality, low-wage jobs, non-farm payrolls, recovery, retail, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I thought I was all finished (mildly) trashing the monthly jobs report that occasioned so much euphoria in the economics world upon its release last Friday, when a quick perusal revealed another big problem. Not only did the Labor Department survey confirm a trend of more and more employment creation coming from parts of the economy heavily reliant on government subsidies (like health care). It also made clear that ever more of the jobs being generated during the current recovery are low-wage positions – which can’t be a sign of anything like real economic health.

First, some definitions. By low-wage, I mean jobs whose hourly wage is less than the private sector average ($24.96 as of the latest available – May – pre-inflation data). Three sectors make up a representative sample: retail, leisure and hospitality, and administrative and support services. Not that these industries contain all of America’s low-wage workers, but taken together they’re a good proxy.

That jobs report last Friday told us that in toto, those industries accounted for 27.68 percent of all U.S. non-farm jobs (the Labor Department’s American jobs universe) in May. (These figures are still preliminary.) But it also made clear that they fueled 45.36 percent of the economy’s overall job growth that month. That’s both much higher than their share of employment and much higher than their January monthly contribution: 29.40 percent.

The year-on-year trends are less dramatic, but they tell the same story. From January, 2014 to January, 2015, low-wage jobs amounted to 34.42 percent of all non-farm jobs the economy added. In May, this year-on-year improvement was up to 35.40 percent.

In fact, since the recovery began – technically in the middle of 2009 – total non-farm employment is up 8.20 percent – 10.735 million jobs. But these low-wage positions increased on net by 14.10 percent – 4.8453 million jobs. Put differently, the low-wage sectors have generated 45.14 percent of all the nation’s jobs comeback since the recession officially ended.

Of course, it’s a free country, so economists and others can interpret these results as they wish. But it’s clear to me that the nation’s enthusiasm about jobs trends should be curbed – which would make this a Larry David Jobs Recovery.