Man, look at all those jobs that Obama isn’t killing with his failed job-killing policies!
The U.S. labor market leaped forward in January, capping the greatest three-month jobs gain in 17 years and delivering the biggest wage increase since 2008.
Payrolls advanced by 257,000 last month following increases in December and November that were even bigger than previously reported, figures from the Labor Department showed Friday in Washington. The unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent from 5.6 percent as more than a million Americans streamed into the labor force seeking work.
The sustained employment gains are creating a virtuous cycle as Americans spend newfound incomes on goods and services. The growth in jobs will probably help assure Federal Reserve policy makers that the expansion is well-rooted and can withstand an increase in interest rates later this year.
“These are pretty amazing numbers,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts, and the top forecaster of payrolls over the last two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. “The January number is strong, but then you’ve got sizzling November and December numbers too. And then you’ve got the wage gains.”
Average hourly earnings jumped 0.5 percent, the most since November 2008, from the prior month. They were up 2.2 percent over the past year, the biggest advance since August.
At this rate if we ever want to see some solid job-killing, we’re going to have to have the Republicans shut down DHS or default on the debt ceiling or fire another 100,000 teachers or something.
That’s job-killing you can count on, America. Not this lame Obama version where we create a million jobs in three months, I mean what kind of job killing is that supposed to be?
debbie
It’s maybe even a little better. I heard a report about 21,000 being laid off in the fracking industry. I was worried that would impact today’s report.
c u n d gulag
Look, as far as funding the DHS is concerned, Republicans and conservatives don’t care if there’s a horrific terrorist attack on us in the US.
They’ve been praying for one since Obama’s hand hit the Bible in January of 2009!
Another one, and they’ll feel assured of winning the Presidency and the Congress in 2012… er, 2016!
And, that’s why they really don’t care about the economy improving.
Another major economic downturn, like a major terrorist event, they believe, will help them win.
Party over people!
Party over country!
PARTY UBER ALLES!!!
SiubhanDuinne
A lefty site on Facebook is flogging the totally unsurprising fact that Faux News is playing its daily “Ain’t It Awful?” game by focussing on the “jump” in the unemployment rate.
Sherparick
I am enjoying the Schadenfreude of George Will, who wrote a column this week belittling the current economic recovery and President Obama’s “dependency economics” and doing a bad faith comparison with the “Morning in America” Recovery of Reagan of thirty years ago,a very different set of economic and demographics then now and of course exclaiming that the Paul Ryan program of tax cuts for the rich and cutting programs for the poor and working class was the way to boost the economy and get the poor and working class out of their “hammock” (which appears to have been the Republican talking point of the week until today). Suck on it George, Boehner, McConnell, and Ryan.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Bad news. More people making more money means less for our betters.
More bad news, unemployment is up. Thanks, Obama!
But hey, one brave American corporation is on it: IBM’s laying off 100,000 people. But don’t call it a layoff. It’s a rebalancing.
Thanks, Obama! Even IBM is laying people off!
Roger Moore
@Sherparick:
I’m sure he didn’t bother to mention that the unemployment rate was solidly over 7% when Reagan declared that it was “Morning in America”. It was higher than the current rate for all but a few months of Reagan’s term, but somehow Reagan was an economic genius while Obama is a failure. It just goes to show that memory is more important than facts.
Shakezula
Wait? You mean if people have more money … they use it … to buy stuff??
I thought the way capitalism worked was that job givers raised prices, lowered wages and then asked for tax cuts and bail outs to stay afloat.
? Martin
@CONGRATULATIONS!: So you think that IBM is laying off 25% of their workforce? Did any, you know, thought go into that estimate or did you just go for the largest number that you thought you could get away with?
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: The early-1980s recession had a sharper peak than the post-2008 recession, but it was also much, much shorter; the “Morning in America” moment came much earlier than the equivalent point for this recession.
Mean and median duration of unemployment is still not down to the point where it was at the peak of the 1980s recession.
That’s what’s really vicious about this most recent one, that it went on so long and people were and are out of work for so long. It’s an effect that lingers well into the recovery period.
One of the main things that’s made the difference, aside from the sheer scale of the ’08 crash, is that we responded to the recession by cutting government spending, at all levels, and despite all of Reagan’s rhetoric, in the 1980s we did not. Those cuts are like a strangling chokehold on the economy.
Tommy
@Matt McIrvin:
Yes, yes, yes. That did in fact happen.
different-church-lady
@? Martin: I’m guessing that eleventy-billion wouldn’t have been subtle enough in the snark department.
ruemara
The amount of people who refuse to believe this, both left & right, are astounding.
And what’s with the CEO of Gallup writing this much shared blog on how the numbers are manipulated and 1 hrs a week is counted as employed?
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
And if you look at the article he’s citing, there’s no mention of a specific number of job cuts. He’s just pulling the 100,000 number- which would apply to IBM’s global job force anyway- out of a hat.
@Matt McIrvin:
By far the biggest difference is the cause of the two recessions. The 1982 recession was purely the work of the Fed. The Fed drastically raised interest rates to slow down inflation. That did the job of crushing inflation, but only at the cost of a lot of jobs. Once inflation was back under control, they lowered rates again and the jobs came back. In contrast, The Great Recession was caused by a massive financial crisis that did serious damage to the underlying economy.
There’s also been a big debt deleveraging. A big part of the GWB economy was financed by people living beyond their means and going ever deeper into debt. Since the formal end of the recession in 2009, people have been paying off household debt to the tune of about 3% of GDP/year. That may be necessary, and our overall economic health is undoubtedly better now that household debt is nearly 20% of GDP lower than it was 6 years ago, but that’s a lot of money that could have grown the economy by financing expenditures. That seems to be tapering off now, and I wonder how much of the better growth is because people are spending money instead of using it to pay down debt.
rikyrah
WHAT would these numbers look like if one political party had not CHOSEN ECONOMIC TREASON against this country, beginning January 20, 2009?
rikyrah
@c u n d gulag:
you are on the money!
C.V. Danes
IBM is laying off 100,000. That should help with the job killing.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore:
That’s why I used to call it “The Potemkin Economy”. The whole thing was fake, and it was pretty obvious that it was fake. And we paid for it. Hard.
The bigger the party, the longer the hangover.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@? Martin: I don’t normally say shit like this, but damn, grow up, man.
ETA: I realize you don’t handle snark well but good God, not everyone is acting in bad faith, but the assumption that everyone is seems to be your automatic go-to position.
John
@Roger Moore: Much as I would like to agree with all of you, if you click through to the article in question, there is a link within the article to another ZDnet article which cites Forbes as the source of the 100,000 number. Specifically, Forbes apparently reported that IBM was planning to lay off 26% of their workforce or 100,00 people in an action dubbed Project Chrome. IBM has replied to the article and stated the number is grossly overestimated.
ETA: IBM uses a system for rating employees dubbed Rank and Yank by GE’s Jack Welch, the douche who popularized the system. Employees are ranked on a bell curve and the bottom third are targeted for performance improvement plans or layoffs. It’s apparently an annual process. Other companies that have adopted the system (such as Microsoft) ended up abandoning it because it has a major negative impact on employee morale.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@ruemara: I saw that yesterday and talk about a bad-faith argument. He is correct as far as the facts go. What we define as “unemployment” and the government’s definition vary quite a bit. His insinuation that this is some new nefarious plan of the Obama administration would be laughable were it not such a serious charge.
He needs to talk with his God Reagan, he’s the one who changed the reporting rules, but he already knew that before even writing the hit piece.
john fremont
@Matt McIrvin: Also too, the prime interest rate was much much higher when Reagan came into office. Paul Volker lowering rates helped with economic recovery back then. Interest rates were already low by historic standards when the Crash of 2008 so that tool wasn’t available so much.
Marc
@John:
“…which would culminate with the chairman of IBM using an orbital laser to carve his face into the moon.”
Mike J
@john fremont: Don’t forget the famous meeting between Volker and President Carter. Volker thought inflation needed to be stopped, and told Carter that his cure for it was going to cost him the election. With some help from Iran, he was right.
Belafon
@John:
“The firings will continue until morale improves.”
Mike J
@John: Did Microsoft dump it? Good to hear. It led to all sorts of horrible things. Like you couldn’t transfer unless you were rated 4 or 5 (our of 5), so supervisors who wanted somebody to transfer would make sure that person got a high rating. And if you were too important to allow a transfer, you got a 3.
There were 10,000 other games that were played with the system that had nothing to do with rewarding good employees and getting rid of the bad.
Mike in NC
@John: As a former subcontractor at a GE facility, I can indeed confirm that morale there sucked. A company that doesn’t spend a dime on its employees if it can find an excuse. They even did away with Styrofoam cups in break rooms.
Matt McIrvin
@ruemara: There’s a lot of stuff going around about how the improving employment numbers are fake somehow.
A popular theme is that we should be looking at U6 instead of U3, the official unemployment rate; the main difference there is that U6 includes people who have been knocked back to part-time employment. But U6, while it’s significantly higher than U3, is dropping as fast as U3 is, and certainly doesn’t show any great anomaly compared to past recessions.
The labor-force participation rate is still going down, but that’s probably at least partly down to demographic changes: Boomers retiring and such. It was rising up until about 2000 entirely because of women gradually entering the workforce (the male LFP rate has been dropping since the 1950s).
There’s this idea that it’s decreasing because of discouraged workers leaving the workforce, but that’s counted in U4 and U5, and if you look at those you find that they’re not really that different from U3. It’s not a huge effect.
japa21
What is with this giving credit to Obama for all these job gains? It says right at the top this is the greatest 3 month period for job growth in 17 years. Yes, it began in November. What else happened in November? Right, the GOP took back the Senate. Obviously, this is all due to the business community feeling good about the GOP winning and therefore, Obama had nothing to do with it. The whole credit goes to the GOP. Oh, but the fact that the unemployment went up is all Obama’s fault.
Just channeling my inner Mitch.
Belafon
OT: Did anyone else watch Steven Universe last night?Moved to the open thread.
Botsplainer
“Morning in America” was a relative handful of Young Republican types riding the gondola under the inflating S&L and junk bond bubble.
Such bullshit. I really regret my votes back then.
Hungry Joe
“Amazing turnaround in the economy as soon as the GOP took control of both houses of Congress!”
That’ll be one of their big selling points in 2016 — and a hell of a lot of people will buy it. (“Whoa … yeah … that WAS about when things started to get better.”) And if you have any doubts about the public’s memory, remember when the GOP’s shutting down the government in 2013 doomed their election hopes for 2014?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@? Martin: Cringely (formerly at InfoWorld, apparently at Forbes now) covered this a couple of weeks ago.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
WereBear
Did a single Dem run on that?
Hungry Joe
@WereBear: Probably not. And the reason no Dem ran on that was … was … what was the reason again?
Matt McIrvin
@Hungry Joe: Die-hard Republicans will buy it, certainly, just like they bought that the 2008 crash happened because the markets were predicting that Obama was going to win. But these aren’t minds that are prone to changing anyway.
Republicans also think it was Gingrich and his Congressional Republicans who turned around the economy around the 1990s and made a boom and a budget surplus. But, by and large, whether it makes sense or not, Clinton usually gets the credit.
If people think the 2014 Congressional wins turned the economy around, the only question to ask is, fine, what did they do that made that happen? Pass bills that Obama vetoed?
Mike J
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: So it doesn’t matter if it’s 100,00, all that matters is what the exact number is, even though it doesn’t matter if 100,000 is actually the number?
Citizen_X
@John:
You know, I can see that being beneficial for the first round, by getting rid of a lot of deadwood. But every year? It’s going to quickly yield very marginal improvements, which’ll be more than undone by political backbiting, gaming the system (as noted above), and company morale going to crap.
God damn Chainsaw Jack.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Mike J: I think that he’s trying to be careful. He has lots of sources at IBM saying big cuts are coming. IBM is trying to finesse the cuts by saying they’re not layoffs. But the headcount at IBM, from all indications, is going to shrink a lot – maybe by 110,000.
IBM does have a long history of big layoffs/resignations/early retirements/etc..
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who has no special insight on IBM’s workforce.)
retiredeng
@c u n d gulag: A terrorist attack or another financial meltdown would be the right’s wet dream. They have a stack of “I told you so’s” in their back pockets and they’ll come out faster than the speed of light.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Citizen_X:
The company my husband works for was taken over by CVS, and he was asked to do a “bell curve” of his employees. Of course, he doesn’t have enough employees to cover all of the shifts, but Cutting Employees Solves Everything!
Randy P
@Citizen_X: I’ve worked places that had ranking systems like that, where every manager was forced to rank their employees and then they all got together in a big room and had to normalize their ratings.
So if you worked for a manager who had put together a Dream Team of solid achievers, meaning that in reality you were one of the, say, top 5% employees of the company, you might end up in the bottom 10% of the Dream Team.
And then after reconciliation you’d be somewhere near the bottom 10% of the entire company.
Really not well thought out. But probably much more common than I’d like to think.
Managers like numbers. You can believe anything if it’s said with numbers. Especially if you’re way up in management and have no idea what anybody does on their job, let alone able to assess what it means to be good at their job.
Roger Moore
@John:
Except that the article he actually cited said:
So he’s quoting a source that’s quoting another article that mentions a third article where than 100,000 number comes from, but his direct quote says quite explicitly that we don’t really know what the number is. Not to mention that whatever the actual number is, it’s going to be from IBM’s global workforce, not just the USA, so the effect here is going to be substantially smaller than the biggest number anyone can find.
Jeffro
Man, that is SO WEIRD: people are getting paid more, so they spend more, so more people get hired…it’s…it’s almost like increasing people’s wages is good for the economy or something.
Origuy
@John:
HP was doing this under Carly Fiorina. It’s one of the reasons she was so hated there. No surprise that she was called “The next Jack Welch” when she took over HP.
? Martin
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: IBM does this every year. They lay some people off, but far more people get reassigned to different units, yet everyone is counting that as a layoff. I have a friend (technical writer) who has gone through this regularly there.
Will IBM lay off or reassign 100,000 employees? That I could see happening. They are undergoing a pretty big restructuring here. They’re also hiring pretty rapidly right now and I wouldn’t be surprised if the employee count at the end of the year was the same as it is now. IBM has been shedding entire divisions the last few years, so clearly there are areas that IBM is no longer interested in working in and those staff will go, and there are areas that IBM is newly interested in working in and those areas are hiring.
I’m not saying this isn’t shitty for the employees (and stack ranking is a seriously shitty regime to work under), but there’s no fucking way these guys are going to end the year with significantly fewer employees than they have now. From the perspective of the US economy, it’s going to be a wash at worst.
Roger Moore
@Randy P:
The problem is that laying off only the people who deserve it requires knowing what is going on in your company. Every manager will try to defend his personal turf by pretending it’s the most important and successful part of the company, so you need to sort through actual facts and figures and stuff to know what’s going on. It’s much easier to demand across the board cuts, which are the kind of thing you can decide on just by looking at some basic accounting numbers.
That whole thing goes back to the Cult of the Genius CEO, which says a top-notch CEO should be able to walk into any company and make it better, regardless of his experience with that company or business sector. If doing a good job actually requires detailed knowledge of the business, it would undermine the whole idea of looking for a high-priced hired gun to run the company and encourage promotion from within. That would severely challenge our whole approach to hiring top management, which absolutely must not be questioned. It’s much better to keep destroying viable companies than to give up on outrageous compensation for top management, regardless of competence.
Davis X. Machina
@c u n d gulag
No revolution without its martyrs…
Gene108
I wonder how much the jump in wage growth is due to all the minimum wage increases that were passed in November and went into effect in January.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
But in most cases those “shed” divisions are sold off rather than shut down completely. When that happens, IBM’s headcount may go down, but the division’s buyer sees their headcount go up. It’s not a net job loss.
Geeno
When I worked at a bank, the fiscal year started October 1st. We used to call the annual layoff-palooza the Octoberfest.
Bill Arnold
@Roger Moore:
They lowered rates again, a lot. Like 8 points IIRC, from somewhere in the mid-high teens. Boom – instant recovery.
Bill Arnold
@Roger Moore:
There were two prongs to the GWB “recovery” – (1) tax cuts for the affluent, (2) real estate bubble for everybody, at least everybody that could qualify for a loan backed by real estate.
Both prongs caused pain, eventually.
Doug r
@Matt McIrvin: Also the Affordable Care Act means the people that are in the right demographic don’t work so many hours anymore
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Am I the only one wondering if the “new” troll is Zandar’s stalker under a new name?
chris murphy
Let’s be realistic, while these numbers are certainly better than would be achieved under any conceivable Republican administration they still suck. A year over year increase in average hourly earnings of 2.2% is at best anemic especially given an unemployment rate of 5.7%. Perhaps this is because the workforce participation remains abysmal.
While we should acknowledge the fact that Obama’s policies are not quite as anti middle and working as the Republicans the fact remains that his economic worldview is fundamentally neo-liberal.
chris murphy
While, as you mention, the workforce participarion rate was increasing only until about the year 2000, it remained basically stable at around 66% until the financial crisis. At which point there was a steep and continuing decline. This sudden decline can hardly be accounted for by demographics.
@Matt McIrvin:
Matt McIrvin
@chris murphy: If you look at it long-term
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CIVPART/
it looks to me like a roughly parabolic curve from the mid-70s to the present, with a wiggle superimposed on top fluctuating with the business cycle. The financial crisis certainly caused the steep drop in ’08, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that all of the current ongoing decline is the effect of the financial crisis. It could just be the resumption of the trend prior to the mid-2000s real-estate bubble.
Zinsky
You know the rat bastard Republicons will claim credit even though they have tried to throw sand in the gears of the economy since Obama took office. It’s always “Heads we win; Tails you lose” with these reptiles!
Matt McIrvin
I think that whether lower workforce participation will drive wages up or down depends on whether it’s driven by decreased labor demand or decreased labor supply. When it drops during a recession, that’s obviously low labor demand, but the long-term trend might have a contribution from lower labor supply.
Seanly
but, but, but the government-hating libertarians on my Facebook are bitching & moaning about which number the government uses. And linking some stupid Gallup Polling blog post bitching about the same thing. Inpeach as Wonkette would say.
chris murphy
Demographics certainly fails to explain the enormous drop in workforce participation among 25-54 year olds.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LNU01300060
@Matt McIrvin:
mai naem mobile
I watched Jack”chicago thug made up lower UE rates”Welch on squawk box the other day. He was harrumphing that if you take Texas out of the employment numbers the UE rate would be a lot higher. Do you think this nutty old man talked about blue states creating more jobs during Raygun or Dubbya? Maroon.
Lurking Canadian
Nobody has commented on this part:
There’s taking away the punch bowl when the party is just getting good, and then there’s takin away the punch bowl as soon as the guests arrive. Why do they need to raise rates? Because of the looming uptick of inflation from 1.5% to 1.7%? We better cool this off before some bond trader loses a basis point!
humanoid.panda
@Zinsky: One of the few upsides of the ignorance of the American voter is that that kind of argument (it really was the Congress, not President!) can’t possibly work with anyone but hardcore partisans. For better or worse, presidents get credited when things get better, and blamed when they get worse. Clinton didn’t get that 66% approval number for his pretty blue eyes..
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Lurking Canadian: Fortunately, there’s been a whispering campaign that the Fed was going to raise interest rates “at their next meeting” for the last 5 years or more. Hasn’t happened yet.
I think Janet knows that the economy, and the average family financial situation, are both still too weak for an interest rate hike to be justified. I assume she has enough sway, as Chair, to keep that from happening until 2016 (at the earliest), but we’ll see.
Or maybe she’ll fake us all out and change the fed funds rate range from 0 – 0.25% to 0.25 – 0.5% or something and let it sit there for another couple of years. ;-)
We’ll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
mclaren
Well, obviously employers are hiring because of their enthusiasm about President Trump taking office. C’mon, surely even a libtard can see that…
mclaren
@Roger Moore:
Bull fucking shit.
Read Cringely. 110,000 IBM workers thrown under the bus just this week.