Friday, March 7, 2014

First look at the latest jobs report out today. Some good, some bad, but not necessarily ugly.

Here is your first look at the BLS's "Establishment Survey" of employment in the US for Feb 2014.  This is a survey of US businesses (big and small) to determine how many jobs have been created in the economy.

I highlight in YELLOW the positives and in RED the lukewarm-to-negatives.

A total of 175,000 new jobs were created in February.  Of that total, 162,000 were private industry jobs and 13,000 were public sector government jobs.  Of those 13,000 government jobs, 11,000 were at the State level, 8,000 were at the Local level and there was a net LOSS of Federal government jobs of 6,000.  I have not looked but guessing a good chunk of those were post office jobs.

"Professional and Businesses Services" was a big gainer at +79,000.  This represents 45% of all the new jobs.  Within the category, 24,400 were Temp jobs.  This represents 31% of the Business and Services jobs created.  So, Professional and Business Service jobs minus Temp jobs was 54,600, which is 31% of all the jobs created.  It has not performed so well the last couple of months, so it picked up the slack somewhat from other sectors that faltered.

We want all job sector boats to rise in the tide.  Seems like job creation lately has been more displacement from one sector to the other as opposed to consistent growth overall.  And THAT latter thing is what we need!


No comments:

Post a Comment

View My Stats