Thoughts on the Feb. Employment Report
Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics release its employment report for Feb. 2012. The headline jobs number of +227,000 was hailed by many as more evidence that the U.S. labor market is healing, or even, "strong." In addition, the January number was revised upwards by 41,000 to 284,000 and the December number was revised upwards by 20,000 to 223,000.
Yet the unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.3%, breaking five months of improvement, as almost half a million workers joined (or more likely, rejoined) the labor force.
My preferred measure of labor-market health, the employment-to-population ratio, edged upwards to 58.6% from 58.5%, which is encouraging, but remains stuck in a range it has not exceeded since August 2009. So don't break out the champaign just yet.
Moreover, the BLS numbers are at odds with another highly respected survey, one done by the Gallup organization. Gallup, which does not seasonally adjust, reported that the unemployment rate jumped from 8.3% in January to 9.0% in February. While much of this discrepancy may be due to seasonal factors, especially given the unseasonably warm February weather, it may be that the Gallup number has caught a trend that the preliminary BLS number has missed. We will have to wait another month to find out exactly what is really going on in the U.S. labor market.
