Unemployment drop has nothing to do with hurricane season
The US unemployment rate fell sharply in September — to 4.2 percent from 4.4 percent in August — but the decline had nothing to do with the hurricanes that battered parts of the southeast and Texas.
The storms, Harvey and Irma, did adversely affect the number of jobs created in the month and that’s why there was a decline of 33,000 jobs.
The Labor Department wants you to believe both those things — the good news that the unemployment rate went down because of the strong economy — and rationalize away the bad news, that the storms and only the storms stole away some jobs.
That’s Labor’s story and they don’t want you asking any questions.
Well, I don’t operate that way. So I ask questions.
The first thing you need to know is that the survey for the September unemployment rate started on Sept. 17 and the last calculations wouldn’t have been completed until this past week.
Hurricane Harvey hit Texas on Aug. 25 and hung around for days, making landfall again on Aug. 30 in Louisiana.
So, think about this. Did the field representatives for the Census Bureau, which conducts the house-to-house surveys that go into the jobless rate, really go knocking on doors to ask people who had just suffered through a devastating hurricane whether or not they were unemployed?
We know from my past investigations that these Census takers have been known to fudge these reports. They even have a name for it — curb-stoning, as in figuratively, “sitting on the curb and filling out a census report yourself.”
Hurricane Irma would have been even worse on the unemployment statistics because it hit the Florida Keys on Sept. 10 and continued its damage for about a week.
Again, were Census workers actually knocking on doors — or even phoning homes — and asking people if they had jobs during the devastation?
Ditto for Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria.
Yet, Labor, in discussing September’s unemployment rate and the storms effect on it, said, “There was no discernible effect on the national unemployment rate” and that “collection rates (of the data) generally were within normal ranges, both nationally and in the affected states.”
Well, whoopee! But excuse my skepticism.
There are more reasons to doubt the veracity of the unemployment rate. According to the survey of households that may not have been taken properly, there was a jump of 906,000 newly employed people in September — and a decline of 331,000 people who were reported to be unemployed.
Now, assume that all 331,000 of those people got jobs (and didn’t die, or stop looking for work, or move to Syria to join ISIS) and we are led to believe that 575,000 people (906,000 minus 331,000) somehow appeared out of nowhere to get jobs.
Where did these extra 575,000 newly employed people come from? They weren’t part of the unemployed. Did they just graduate from school — in September? — or suddenly say, “Hey, I should get off this couch and get a job.”
I doubt it. And until you can answer that question you don’t know how the jobless rate declined in September.
Labor also announced that its other survey of companies found that there was a drop of 33,000 jobs in September.
Yes, I know. How can there be a drop when they surveyed companies, but a gain of 906,000 jobs when they surveyed households?
It’s one of life’s great mysteries.
I can understand, in a way, the decline in jobs. Perhaps employers, who just hired people, were too busy securing their building to send Labor their reports.
I just find it funny that Labor is so willing to blame the hurricanes for bad news, but not give the storms credit for the good unemployment rate.