The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today issued a major downward revision in total employment, telling us what more savvy observers of the federal jobs data already knew. Namely, that the employment situation isn’t nearly as strong as the federal establishment survey says it is.
The establishment survey is the employment survey that looks at total jobs—whether full time or part time—and not at total employed people.
So, that’s the report that’s being revised here, and it’s the biggest downward revision since 2009 when the economy was in bad shape during the Great Recession. It’s the second largest downward revision on record.
This is for the year ending in March 2024, and specifically, the BLS has reduced the total jobs numbers for the period by 818,000 jobs. For context for this number, we can keep in mind, that since late 2022, total monthly jobs growth numbers ranged from about 150,000 up to about 300,000.
So, by cutting 818,000 off the top, what the BLS is saying is that about four months of job growth as reported in 2023 and early 2024, never actually happened.
That is, through that period, as the media repeatedly told us about “blowout” jobs reports, those were phantom jobs that didn’t exist.
Or put another way, the average monthly jobs increase over the past year was revised downward from 218,000 to 150,000. That’s a decline of more than 31 percent.
Of course, we already knew recent jobs reports—as far as the establishment survey is concerned, was based largely on made up numbers.
For one, a lot of the alleged job growth was based on the fiction of the so-called birth-death model. This is a model used by the number crunchers at the BLS to simply make up estimates for how many jobs are being created at imagined new businesses. These numbers are not based on any actual surveys at all. In some months, that made-up number of new jobs totaled up to hundreds of thousands of jobs. In May 2024, for example, the BLS added 231,000 hypothetical jobs to the total through this model.
So, it’s no shock that on subsequent revisions, it turns out a lot of the job growth in those blowout jobs reports was imaginary.
Some jobs totals were actually revised upward in this report, though. Government jobs, it turns out, were underreported during the period. So the BLs has revised those taxpayer funded jobs up by 1,000 while cutting private sector job growth.
These revisions are only surprising, though, if we never bothered to look beyond the establishment survey. But, for anyone who takes the trouble to look beyond the establishment survey. For months now, it’s been apparent in other jobs data that the employment situation is in trouble. The household survey, for example, tells us more about employed persons than simply total jobs. And what that report has shown us since September of last year is that total growth in employed persons has flatlined. There has NOT been any growth in employed workers in 11 months. Moreover, most of that has been in part-time employment. That is, it stands to reason that workers who do have jobs are increasingly making ends meet by working two or more jobs.
Year over year, full time employment is down, and that usually points to recession.
Temp jobs are down, and that also points to recession.
And, of course, the unemployment rate for July moved upward enough to trigger the Sahm rule, which is a reliable indicator of recession.
So, it turns out the amazingly strong economy of Bidenomics was greatly overstated, and there is likely more bad news on the horizon.
