You've got to be careful with Epstein - he's very sloppy with data, citation, and argument.
>But before we elaborate further, it's worth looking at the November
>employment report, released Friday, to see what it can tell us about the
>bigger-picture trend in jobs. By showing a rise in payroll employment of
>215,000 and an unchanged unemployment rate of 5%, the report lent further
>confirmation to the trends that first appeared in early '04: Employment
>increases that are fairly modest by the standards of the late-1990s have
>been enough to lower the unemployment rate by nearly half a percentage point
>per year.
The labor force grew very slowly in November, and the share of the population classed as not in the labor force grew. In other words, it seems that some people are either withdrawing from the labor force or not entering it. The share of the adult population at work declined last month, and is almost 2 percentage points below its 2000 peak.
>So if, as seems likely, these trends persist through '06, the labor markets
>will get increasingly tight as the rate of joblessness moves squarely into
>the mid-4% region -- a prospect that seems underappreciated by the bond
>market.
For a labor market that's allegedly getting tight, wage growth sucks - real wages are declining at a rate of over 1% a year.
>Let's look at the numbers as they stood in the third quarter of 2005, the
>most recent period for which data are available, compared with a fairly
>tough base period -- 2000, the peak year of the previous boom, when the
>unemployment rate was at a 30-year low. For example, if management jobs are
>supposed to be in peril, you wouldn't know it from the figures. With a total
>of 20.5 million folks currently employed as manager in the U.S., this
>category of employment has added nearly a million jobs since 2000. Then, as
>now, about one out of seven jobs in the U.S. is classified as managerial.
This all depends on what you're calling managers. The "management of companies and enterprises" category in the establishment survey, which doesn't include the produce manager at Kroger's, numbers 1.7 million, off 80,000 since the 2000 peak, and off 1,000 over the last year.
>But blue-collar work is hardly going extinct. The decline in factory
>employment was more than offset by increases in construction (+1.9 million),
>installation and repair (+0.5 million), and transportation and trucking
>(+200,000).
Construction has been growing thanks to the housing boom, which is a cause not without its problems. And transportation and trucking includes people who are moving all those imported goods around; getting stuff from Long Beach to Chicago takes some work.
>In fact, BLS data recently marked a first: There are now more construction
>workers in the U.S. than factory workers (9.4 million versus 9.2 million).
I don't know what stats he's looking at; in November, there were 7.4 million workers in construction vs. 14.3 million manufacturing. (See for yourself: <ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/empsit.txt >. He may be looking at occupational classifications, while I'm looking at industrial sectors, but with Epstein, you never know.
Doug