Ask the Labor Department: Highlights From Chat on Jobs Data
This morning the Labor Department held its first live Web chat where experts answered questions from the public about BLS data. We?ve abridged it down to a few of our favorites and we?ve corrected some questionable spelling and grammatical choices along the way. Here?s a taste of what you missed:
Q: ?why is this report released on Excellent Friday?
A:?The BLS news release schedule for major economic indicators, including the Employment Situation, is announced prior to the commencement of the calendar year, allowing advance notice to all users, and is rarely theme to change. BLS schedules news releases any day the federal government is scheduled to be open, based on when data will become final.
Q: Does the BLS have an estimate of the extent to which disruptive weather in the mid-Atlantic affected payrolls in February and March?
A: ?Brutal winter weather in parts of the country during February may have affected payroll employment and hours; but, it is not doable to quantify precisely the net impact of the winter storms on CES employment measures. In the establishment survey, workers who do not hear any pay for the entire pay period are not counted as employed. Workers are counted as employed in the establishment survey if they are paid for a single hour during the reference pay period, whether they worked or not. We do not know how many workers may have been added to payrolls for snow confiscation, cleanup, and repairs due to the storms. Nor do we know how new hiring or separations were affected by the weather.
Q: Of the people that are going from unemployed to out of the labor force each month (looking at the labor force flows data), is there any data on what these people are doing? Are they retiring ahead of schedule? Going to school? Something else?
A: The BLS data on labor force flows does not provide information on what people who stopped looking for work are doing. The questions in the household survey are design to track labor market endeavor (employment and job search) but not other activities.
Q: Do you have data regarding individuals working beyond the age of retirement?
A: You might be interested to see a recent piece that Emy Sok published on older workers http://www.bls.gov/opub/ils/summary_10_04/older_workers.htm
Q: What percentage of respondents to the BLS’ Establishment Survey are small, medium, large companies? I know that the responses are statistically adjusted to represent the small/medium/large makeup of employment in companies, but was curious as to how the actual survey is broken out.
A: ? Table 2-Cc on http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cestntab.htm displays total private CES try out employment by size.
Q: Why is March selected as the bench mark month as opposed to other months?
A: ? March is selected for the once a year benchmark, because it has less regular alteration than most months and no holidays.
Q: Do you reckon it’s honest that the unemployed who have fallen off the radar, those who have exhausted their 99 weeks, are NOT COUNTED amongst the unemployed because they can no longer certify? How are the numbers valid and accurate if hundreds of thousands this year are uncounted?
A: ?The Unemployment Insurance (UI) program is completely separate from the survey used for our official unemployment statistics. The receipt of UI has NO bearing on whether a person is classified as unemployed, which is based on a person?s recent job search and availability to work. If you are not working, are available to work, and have actively looked for work in the past 4 weeks you are counted as unemployed in our measures.
Q: The commonly cited unemployment rate for the Fantastic Depression is 25% – one quarter of people out of work. After doing some research of my own, there was not an “official” measure of unemployment during that period, and as a replacement for the rate had to be calculated by Census data. Was there any measure of discouraged workers during that time period? How would we measure Fantastic Depression unemployment today?
A: You’re right?unemployment figures generally were not available during the 1930s. The source for the official unemployment statistics for the nation, the Current Population Survey, was not introduced until 1940. Unemployment estimates for the 1930s were backcast by available data sources for the era and approximate what the rate would have been had current concepts and methods been used. To the best of my knowledge, unknown has place together a data run on discouraged workers for the 1930s.