I’ve been silent on this problem for two years even though many people have noticed it. Today it is really too much. It needs to be called out.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in its press release says the following: “The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons, at 4.2 million, changed little in August. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs.”
Whew, no change. That’s good news, right? All media outlets dutifully reported the exact words of the BLS, as they always do. There are deadlines, you know, and the need for clicks is intense. Who has time to look at the actual data?
Well, let’s look at table A-8 from the government’s own statistics. Here we find an increase of people in this category from 4 million to 4.221 million. That’s an increase of 221,000 people working part-time not by choice. That’s a 5.5 percent increase. In what world is that “changed little?” Truly, who writes this stuff? An increase of 221,000 working part time is larger than the total number of nonfarm payroll employment increase of 187,000, the headline number.
One might suppose that if the number of new part-timers was larger than the number of total jobs created, that would be the headline. Instead, as of this writing, I don’t see any news reports that mention this at all. One only needs to note that the number of multiple job holders has increased by the same amount, strongly suggesting that full-time jobs are being lost and converted, when possible, to part-time jobs.
This has been going on for many months now. It is a notable change. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while burying the data in its release, makes no mention of this in its press release that is reprinted by all economics reporters. That means that a dramatic change in the professional lives of millions of people is largely unknown to the public at large.
I’ve known many people who work for the BLS and similar institutions. They don’t think of themselves as political at all. They consider themselves above it all. They are professionals with high-end training and credentials. The White House has traditionally left them alone to do their work.
It does seem like something has changed in the last several years. There is someone who wrote those words “changed little” even though the data says otherwise. Did this person get a call from the White House after an early release? Or did the writer just know without being told what is in his or her best interest? It’s impossible to know, but it’s easy to smell the rat here.
- June payrolls originally reported: 209K
- June payrolls revision one month later: 185K
- June payrolls revision two months later: 105K
He further notes that “the last two months just lost 110k jobs in downward revisions—meaning 59 percent of the jobs “gained” in Aug were jobs we thought we already had.”
He adds: “While we’re on the ‘revisions’ topic—every month this year has been revised down w/ a huge cumulative effect: 355k overestimation, and over 300k from preliminary benchmark, meaning total downward revision of 661k—that’s 30 percent of all the jobs we thought we added this year.”
When you add to this that the jobs being created are really a conversion from full time to part time, plus the increase in the number of people holding multiple jobs, and now the large increase in the unemployment rate, it paints a very grim picture. It is nothing like the beautiful world that the press releases are painting for us.
It is a known fact that we live in an age of the loss of trust. The only question is how far and how deep this should go. It appears that not even the boring, old, staid bureaucrats at the Department of Labor are beyond shilling for the Biden administration. There are two parts to this bad news: the data reveals a reality far more grim than we are being told, plus the government is lying about it.
