When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.
The special note said that if this “misclassification error” had not occurred, the “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” meaning the unemployment rate would be about 16.3 percent for May. But that would still be an improvement from an unemployment rate of about 19.7 percent for April, applying the same standards.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs reports, said it was working to fix the problem.
“BLS and the Census Bureau are investigating why this misclassification error continues to occur and are taking additional steps to address the issue,” said a note at the bottom of the Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
The truth is that even with the adjustment the jobs report is better than expected. And I honestly can’t figure out why anyone thought that unemployment would continue to spike in May when parts of the country were already opening up. The reports shows that a big chunk of jobs gained was in places like dentistry which was obviously going to open at the earliest opportunity because it’s essential! Health care in general gained a lot of jobs in May for the same reason.
Also the PPP program allowed a lot of businesses to rehire even if they weren’t fully open, which was the whole point of the program. And, as we saw, there were a bunch of states allowing businesses to re-open prematurely.
So why was there the expectation that there would be another month of huge job losses? I don’t get it.
Trump was happy, and he’s out there urging all states to ignore the pandemic as he takes credit for greatest economic “comeback” in world history and acts as though he’s going to coast to re-election, having no responsibility for the wretched pandemic response and all the credit for any recovery.
Meanwhile, we’re still losing about a thousand people to COVID every day and the streets are roiling with social unrest and demands for systemic change in our racist criminal justice system.
I’m tired of all the winning.