PRESS RELEASE
Dismal U.S. Jobs Reports Actually Used Statistical Fraud To Cover Up Even Worse Reality
Jan. 8, 2008 (EIRNS)—As bad as the U.S. jobs report for the year 2007 was, the reality was worse. Examining the month-by-month reports on employment put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) during 2007, shows that all of the meager job growth claimed for the year, was produced by imputed data projections of the Bureau's so-called "Jobs Death/Jobs Birth" computer model. Virtually none of the claimed job growth was actually found in the surveys the BLS takes.
Of the 1,208,000 new jobs which BLS announced were created during the year, 1,131,000 were simply imputed to new, small businesses which the BLS assumed were started up during the year, and which it assumed created those jobs, based on previous years' statistics.
In one example of the unreality involved: The BLS computer model assumed that from August through December, 67,000 net new jobs were created by "Financial Services" companies—when in fact, banks, mortgage lenders, mutual fund operators, insurance companies, reeling from the mortgage bubble's implosion, were clearly laying off tens of thousands of employees each month during that time. And the "Jobs Death/Jobs Birth" model assumed that such invisible, new small businesses created a net 138,000 new construction jobs during 2007, when real, surveyed construction businesses reported a drop in employment of 358,000 workers during the year! As a result, the BLS reported 220,000 construction jobs lost during 2007, when the reality was probably much worse.
This means that the BLS' actual monthly surveys—which reach, by mail and telephone, 165,000 large and middle-sized firms each month—actually did not detect any job creation at all for the entire year—a grand total of only 68,000 new jobs actually reported by real businesses. And in all of the productive areas of the economy—what the survey calls "Goods-Producing" sectors—they detected a very real collapse of employment, more than 500,000 jobs lost.
That's worse than a recession, buddy. And it fits the gloomy reality of the other BLS monthly survey, the "Household Survey," finding 900,000 more Americans unemployed, and 456,000 more Americans forced into part-time work, at the end of 2007 than at the beginning. This survey found, in particular, that unemployment among young workers, under 21, rose to 17.1% by December; and among young Black workers, rose to 34.7%.
