What's in a Verb? A Great Deal at BLS
Staff Works in Secrecy Preparing Jobs Reports
By David Finkel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 2, 2004; Page A23
There is the matter of the trash. By 8:30 this morning, it will -- how to say this politely -- need to be emptied.
There is the matter of the man with the watch. The watch is set to Naval Observatory time, and by 8:29, the man will be watching it tick, tick, tick until he rises from his chair and shouts loud enough to be heard in every cubicle, "It is 8:30."
And finally, there is the matter of the verb. By 8:30:01, the world will learn whether the winner of five days of intense discussions behind the locked doors of the U.S. Division of Labor Force Statistics is "declined," "rose," "edged," "nudged" or "remained the same."
All of this becomes clear today because this is the first Friday of the month that follows the first Thursday of the month, which means the latest national employment figures are being released by the Labor Department. Precisely at 8:30 a.m., America will learn how many jobs and unemployed workers it had in March, and then a great Washington ritual will begin: Republicans will say one thing; Democrats will say the opposite; President Bush will have something positive to say. The stock exchanges will open the day's trading with their own interpretations, and analysts will go on television and argue with one another.
There is another ritual as well, the one leading up to the report's release, carried out in such secrecy that for four days there has been no trash pickup at the office where the employment report is prepared.
"We encourage people to take the smelly trash to the pantry," Tom Nardone, chief of the 24-person office, said before the lockdown, but other than that, all week long, nothing gets out of the fourth-floor office in the Postal Square Building across from Union Station.
The reason for the secrecy is the importance of the report, which has profound political and financial consequences.
"There's money that's made or lost on the movement of these numbers," Nardone said. "That's one reason. The other is we strive to have a level playing field" in which everyone, except for a few dozen people, learns the numbers at the same time.
To that end, workers for the Census Bureau began gathering employment data in mid-March as part of its monthly survey of 60,000 U.S. households, the results of which will translate into the unemployment rate. At about the same time, Nardone said, payroll data from 400,000 businesses was being compiled to produce a second essential statistic, the number of nonfarm jobs. Both of these statistics will be highlighted in the first sentence of today's report, which, in tone if not content, will sound very much like the one from last month's report: "Nonfarm employment was little changed (+21,000) in February, and the unemployment rate remained at 5.6 percent."
Neutral as such a sentence may seem, what to say in it has been at the heart of meeting after meeting this week as the March figures were prepared for release. How do you distill into a few carefully chosen words 1.7 million numeric descriptions of working America that get down to the micro level of how many Hispanic women between the ages of 20 and 24 were working in March in the manufacture of stone, clay and glass products?
The process began full time Monday morning when the entrance doors were locked, two big green trash containers were wheeled into position and data from the household survey began streaming in from Census. One staff member was assigned to write a draft summary of the household data, another was assigned to write about the payroll data, and a third was assigned to draft the official statement to be made by Nardone's boss, Kathleen P. Utgoff, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On Tuesday, the bulk of the payroll data arrived, and Nardone, the three writers and two supervisors met to begin hammering out the language of those first sentences. "Verbs," he said, "are the big part."
What is an acceptable verb? "Declined," Nardone said. "Rose. Grew." What about dropped? "We've used dropped," he said. Shed? "Shed we use." Bled? "No." Plunged? "No." Nose-dived? "No. The thing we're trying to avoid is being judgmental. . . . If you use nose-dived, or bled, or soared, or skyrocketed, then you're not just providing direction, there's some judgment of the direction."
Slumped?
"No, I think we would really stay away from that one."
On Wednesday, supervisors began reviewing the drafts. Corrections were made and reviewed. More corrections were made, and then Nardone convened a meeting to get down to the nitty-gritty of the opening lines. "We've never come to blows," he said, "but, you know, voices can be raised. Things can be said."
Yesterday brought more meetings with an ever-larger cast of characters, including a midday meeting with Utgoff, which was scheduled to last "until the boss is happy." Final revisions were made about whether to highlight mitigating factors such as strikes and oddball weather, Web site tables were prepared and a preview of the report was sent to Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, the only people outside a select few at the Bureau of Labor Statistics authorized to see the figures before their release. The CEA, in turn, prepared a summary that typically is given late Thursday to Bush, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary John W. Snow.
As for today, the report itself becomes available at 8 a.m. to Greenspan, Snow, Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao, Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans and certain news reporters who are sequestered until 8:30 in a locked room monitored by Labor Department employees to make sure no advance word of the report leaks out.
What will the report say? What did Nardone and his staff come up with to characterize March? Did employment rise? Fall? Remain unchanged?
The answer, as of 8:30 a.m., is at www.bls.gov, with interpretations available on TV, in financial markets and in political campaigns just about the time Nardone will be moving on to his next task.
"Friday at 8:35," he said, "that's when I'm thinking about emptying those trash cans."
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