The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its employment situation report for May 2010. As expected the situation is largely unchanged:
Total nonfarm payroll employment grew by 431,000 in May, reflecting the hiring of 411,000 temporary employees to work on Census 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Private-sector employment changed little (+41,000). Manufacturing, temporary help services, and mining added jobs, while construction employment declined. The unemployment rate edged down to 9.7 percent.
Household Survey Data
The number of unemployed persons was 15.0 million in May. The unemployment rate edged down to 9.7 percent, the same rate as in the first 3 months of 2010. (See table A-1.)
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for blacks (15.5 percent) declined in May, while the rates for adult men (9.8 percent), adult women (8.1 percent), teenagers (26.4 percent), whites (8.8 percent), and Hispanics (12.4 percent) showed little change. The jobless rate for Asians was 7.5 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables
A-1, A-2, and A-3.)In May, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) was about unchanged at 6.8 million. These individuals made up 46.0 percent of unemployed persons, about the same as in April.
As I have noted here before most of the employment gains are the result of the hiring of temporary workers for the Census. Not only will those go away over the period of the next six to eight weeks but they may be misleading as well with the same workers being hired and re-hired repeatedly.
Retail will not recover as long as people are too worried about the future to spend or are just plain tapped out. Confidence in the future won’t be restored until we see some solid employment gains.
The next few months may be politically difficult for Democrats. I see the White House and Congressional Democrats pulling out as many stops as they can to keep the unemployment rate below 10% in September. The September report, released in the first work of October, will be the last employment report issued by the BLS before the November mid-term elections. An unemployment rate of 10% would be bad news for incumbents, Democratic incumbents particularly. Look for a big push for another stimulus package from the usual suspects.
