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Data from the BLS, chart by Mish

QCEW data for this post is from today’s BLS release County Employment and Wages Second Quarter 2024.

Chart Notes

• The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) is a dataset published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). QCEW is comprehensive, capturing 95% of US wage-and-salary jobs. The sample size is 12.2 million establishments.
• The Current Employment Statistics (CES) Nonfarm Payroll Report comes out monthly. The sample survey is 629,000 individual establishments in 2024.
• The Employment Level is from the monthly BLS Household Survey that also estimates the unemployment rates.

For more discussion, please see BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages: Concepts

Nonfarm payrolls count jobs. If someone has three jobs, they are counted three times. Employment is binary. You are either employed or you aren’t.

However, not employed does not mean unemployed. To be unemployed, you have to be able to work, and actively looking for work.

There’s a strict definition of looking that requites an interview or submitting an application, not just doing an online search.

Three Measures of Employment in Thousands

Three Measures of Employment Change in Thousands

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Mish July 26, 2024: Expect the BLS to Revise Job Growth Down by 730,000 in 2023, More This Year

At the heart of these revisions is a horribly flawed birth-death model used by the BLS. My calculation closely matches an estimate by Bloomberg’s chief Economist.

Mish August 21, 2024: BLS Revises Jobs Down by 818,000 the Most Ever, About 68,000 Per Month

Do I get to say I told you so? My advance estimate a month ago was 779,000 lower. Bloomberg estimated 730,000.

The reports are not directly comparable, with precision, especially given the jobs vs employment discrepancy.

However, my prior comparisons and advance calls suggest we see negative revisions in nonfarm payrolls from 2023 Q2 to 2024 Q2 of well over one million. My initial stab is about 1.2 million to the downside.

The BLS Birth-Death model is seriously mess up an/or the BLS is oversampling large corporations and under sampling small businesses.

The BLS monthly nonfarm payroll reports are consistent garbage.

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