The unemployment rate dropped to 6.2% last month! Yippee!
[now comes the small print.]
The economy is still bleeding jobs; 44,000 net lost, with 71,000 in manufacturing and 16,000 in transportation. But, hey, there's a boom in temporary employment! Lose a good paying, good benefits, union factory job, and be happy with your new low paying, no bennies temp job. Sweet.
So how did the Administration do it? How did the economy lose jobs, and yet the unemployment rate managed to creep down two tenths of a percentage point?
Well, they shifted a record number of workers off the books; the civilian labor force decreased by 556,000. So I guess Secretary Chao will now claim that all those people who started pounding the pavement looking for work in June because of the great economic rebound, have headed back to their couches not having found work. Oh well.
Since the weather here is supposed to be crappy all day, many of my aforementioned errands need to be postpones, so I'll spend more time on this later, after reading some of the spin. At this point, my respect for the Administration has reached an all time low; even the wording of the BLS release reeked of manipulation.
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Posted by: ben at August 27, 2003 08:40 AM