About 92% -- 577,000 of the jobs in the household survey -- were part-time only. Further, these 629,000 jobs also included uncompensated family employees and agricultural jobs, which, by definition, are not included in the nonfarm payroll survey.
That criticism missies the point. The most talked about figure from both reports is the change in total employment. The household survey is more accurate at dealing with this change because 1 - It counts all jobs (to the extent they can be counted), and 2 - It is not distorted by changes in job turnover the way the payroll data is.
The payroll survey is derived from 400,000 businesses. It is a summary of corporate payroll data. There is simply no reason, nor any upside, for a corporate human resource person to falsify this information.
I have no reason to think it is falsified or that it is an inaccurate report. Also the payroll data does have the advantage of a bigger sample, but it has a more distorted sample because it is a survey of established employers and doesn't count startups or the self employed. It counts large and medium sized firms, not small or new companies or people working for themselves. The household survey has a smaller sample but it is at least a small sample of all different types of jobs, and this isn't the only problem with the payroll data.
Repeating a very important point from my post -
..And today of all days, the Labor Department published its very first, preliminary assessment of the impact of job-changing on the payroll survey (see "Effects of Job Changing on Payroll Survey Employment Trends"). It acknowledges the Heritage Foundation's analysis from March 2004 (see “Diverging Employment Data: A Critical View of the Payroll Survey” by Tim Kane, Ph.D.) that worker turnover has a significant effect on the payroll survey, inflating the total count by over a million jobs, but also by over-emphasizing job losses during business cycles when turnover declines. Since March 2001, BLS estimates that the "job-changing effect" has led to an overstatement of 251,000 job losses in currently published data."
Other studies (for example the Heritage Foundation's study) show an even larger distortion, but even if you go with the smaller official estimate the payroll study shows a loss off 251,000 jobs that where not lost just from the change in turnover rates plus an additional unspecified amount of jobs "loses" when people transferred from established firms to new or small companies or to working for themselves.
There are other indicators of job growth as well
"The ISM manufacturing and non-manufacturing employment indices, for example, have been at 50 or above—indicating improvement—for 14 and 10 straight months respectively, including several all-time highs. Consumer confidence is rising..."
However statistics are never perfect, esp. in a rapidly changing economy with many small businesses and people who are self employed. The household survey, the payroll report, the ISM manufacturing and non-manufacturing indices, and all other job statistics all have problems and imperfections, and probably always will. Overall the data seems to indicate a growing economy with low unemployment and some job growth.
Tim |
