Soooo. the unemployment #s reported were WRONG! They failed to count 5 million people,

[napi21]

DT's bragging was all for naught.

Info from "60 Minutes program on CBS.

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. And how is it they did that but never do that under any other presidency, I wonder

[PCIntern]

2. It's unbelievable.

[onecaliberal]

3. I knew it. I posted asking if anyone else thought the #'s were off.

[Dream Girl]

7. I knew it too but was surprised to see the correction so soon. By then of course, it was too late

Trump was crowing about it and I’m sure many will never know the number was wrong. Something about a lie going around a world before the truth gets its pants on.

[onecaliberal]

10. The dump crowd won't believe anything.

[Nevilledog]

4. Let's see how trump answers questions about this. I'm guessing "That's a nasty question!"

[MyOwnPeace]

17. Give me "That's a nasty question" Alex, for $600......

[progree]

20. or "You are really something" as when he was asked why the black UR was still going up

# Black unemployment rate https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000006
First 5 months of 2020: 6.0, 5.8, 6.7, 16.7, 16.8  

# White unemployment rate https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000003
First 5 months of 2020: 3.1, 3.1, 4.0, 14.2, 12.4

(by the way, the March, April and May numbers above are wrong (too low) because some unemployed were conveniently misclassified as employed as I've yammered about in post12 and 16)

https://www.democraticunderground.com/10142508011

Trump says he hopes George Floyd 'looking down' and seeing today's jobs numbers as 'a great day for

Donald Trump says he hopes George Floyd, who was killed by police on Memorial Day after an officer forced his knee on the back of his neck for nearly nine minutes while facing the ground in handcuffs, is "looking down right now" and saying today is a "great thing that's happening for our country" as the nation's unemployment rate declined but remains higher than during the Great Recession.

The president said: "Hopefully George is looking down right now and saying, 'This is a great thing that's happening for our country. It's a great day for him, it's a great day for everybody. It's a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day."

Asked how the rate of unemployment among black Americans can be considered a "victory" as it continues to increase, the president told a reporter outside the White House, "You are really something."

Remember when Trump told black people during the campaign, "what have you got to lose?"

I dunno. a 16.8% black unemployment rate means a large majority are still not unemployed. Not yet anyway. MAGA!

[lpbk2713]

5. What? My president is lying to me?

You bet your ass he is.

[PaxtonSahara]

6. There was never a time like this under another president

FYI. The numbers are processed by the BLS, mainly career professionals. The instrument used to collect the data could not be adjusted to include a choice for COVID-19 so the choice "Other reason not working" had to be used. When they processed the data there was an error as "Other" is not usually used in a specific way like this. As soon as it was caught the same day it was corrected. I head a data collection team and it was drilled into all of use to enter COVID related data correctly. Wish the mistake hadn't been made but, please understand, we are all under stress trying to get it right and know we are not perfect. It may not seem like it but data collection for labor statistics has an especially tight window and the deadlines are fierce even under normal times. Just sayin'.

However, i do enjoy seeing tRump look like the fool he is.

[panader0]

15. Welcome to DU. Good info.

[progree]

16. It's way more than a bit bothersome that the same problem happened in March and April too

Last edited Mon Jun 8, 2020, 05:49 AM - Edit history (2)

And to be clear: the numbers in the report are wrong. They were not corrected. The only "correction" is a long-winded note to point out that the numbers are mistaken, at least the employment and unemployment numbers (the error was that some unemployed were miscategorized as employed).

3 months in a row. 3 months in a row.

Details #12 in this thread
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=13560715

As soon as it was caught the same day it was corrected.

False. An error notice was put in the report. But not a single number was corrected. Not one. The reader was left to do the math: 13.3% + "about 3 percentage points" = "about 16.3%". (And the reader was also left to seasonally adjust the "about 3 percentage points" too. Nice.)

They explicitely said the error was not corrected:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

| If the workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to "other |
| reasons" (over and above the number absent for other reasons in a typical May) had |
| been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate |
| would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported (on a not seasonally |
| adjusted basis). However, according to usual practice, the data from the household |
| survey are accepted as recorded. To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc actions are |
| taken to reclassify survey responses.

And that's for just the national U-3 unemployment rate. What about black unemployment? white? male? female? the different age groups? U-4, U-5, U-6? And their demographic subgroups? How about states and other geographic entities?

And what about the unemployed count in thousands, both overall (20,985,000) and for the demographic subgroups? Any of those corrected? Nope, I didn't think so.

And the Employed number was not corrected. If 4.7 million were misclassified as employed, that means that the reported 3.8 M gain in Employed is really a 0.9 million LOSS.

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000

Needless to say, all the demographic subgroups of Employed are wrong too.

And are you telling us that it all came to light in a single day? Particularly considering the same errors occurred in March and April?

And hell, after all this time, the March and April unemployment rates haven't been corrected. E.g. April is still reported as 14.7% in the data series, when the correct number is 14.7% + "almost 5 percentage points" = almost 19.7%.

See here for the unemployment rate: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

[napi21]

21. Please understand, I wasn't blaming you or anyone when i posted this thread. My biggest gripe was

DT bragging about how great a job HE'D DONE! Anyone whose not a chronic narcissist wouldn't have done that BECAUSE very little if anything a resident can do would affect the unemployment rate, and HE hasn't done much of anything.

I know what it's like to be under the gun to get something done in crunch time. Mistakes happen.

[Journeyman]

8. As Bartcop used to opine, anytime something happens that benefits the Republicans . . .

no matter how marginal the help may be, or how innocent the rationale, expect to see that same "accident" happen again and again.

[mucifer]

9. DT's bragging worked.It was all over the news that the employment numbers were

"surprisingly good"

They know what they are doing folks.

[Demovictory9]

11. but last month would have been higher also, so there still would have been a drop

but super high numbers for both months. nothing to brag about. paricularly with rates rising for two groups (Afican am, hispanic)

[Blue_true]

19. People in service jobs have gone back to work.

Factories that have floor workers here in my part of Florida have reopened with lower staff.

Unemployment will get better because of the above changes, but it will plateau until something changes with SARS-COV-2 infections, in a drastically positive direction.

[progree]

12. March and April also had the same problem. March was "almost 1 percentage point",

April was "almost 5 percentage points", and May was "about 3 percentage points" off (i.e. the unemployment rates in the respective months would be higher by these amounts were it not for these mis-classification errors).

The values as published in April were 14.7%, and in May was 13.3%

Using corrected values for both April and May, the unemployment rate was almost 19.7% in April and about 16.3% in May.

This misclassification error is spelled out in a big Cov19 box at the bottom of the BLS summary that was released as part of the original release at 830 AM ET Friday June 5. (So it's not a correction they reported later -- the correction box note was included as part of the original release. Unfortunately none of the numbers are corrected -- the note just says the numbers are wrong. Sigh).

Here is the bottom of the Covid 19 box in the BLS's jobs report summary
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm .

| If the workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to "other |
| reasons" (over and above the number absent for other reasons in a typical May) had |
| been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate |
| would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported (on a not seasonally |
| adjusted basis). However, according to usual practice, the data from the household |
| survey are accepted as recorded. To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc actions are |
| taken to reclassify survey responses.

Similarly it was also presented that that way in the bottom of the March and April summaries, just with different values "almost 1 percentage point" in March and "almost 5 percentage points" in April.

What's particularly irksome is that they waited until the bottom of the summary to tell us. And while it's in a big box, its a long multi-paragraph box, and it doesn't tell us what we need to know until the final sentence of that long box. (Click on the above link to see the original (and current) release and scroll down and down).

The Washington Post article says that despite efforts to correct the problem (good article on the problem, BTW), "there are lots of field staff who had a tried and true way of asking questions and they were doing what they were used to doing.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/05/may-2020-jobs-report-misclassification-error

(I think we've all had coworkers like that. Still, I'm disappointed that after 3 months they still can't get a handle on it -- they made the same kind of error in March and April -- April's error was even larger, "almost 5 percentage points".

Economists say the BLS was trying to be as transparent as possible about how hard it is to collect real-time data during a pandemic. The BLS admitted that some people who should have been classified as “temporarily unemployed” during the shutdown were instead misclassified as employed but “absent” from work for “other reasons.”

... One of the first questions that gets asked is did the person do any work “for pay or profit?” There are then 45 pages of follow up questions that come after that. One of those questions asks if someone was “temporarily absent” from the job and why that absence occurred. One of the responses is “other.”

The BLS instructed surveyors to try to figure out if someone was absent because of the pandemic and, if so, to classify them as on “temporary layoff,” meaning they would count in the unemployment data. But some people continued to insist they were just “absent” from work during the pandemic, and the BLS has a policy of not changing people’s answers once they are recorded. It’s how the BLS protects again bias or data manipulation.

... “It’s surprising the BLS couldn’t come up with fixes to make this work in May,” said Erica Groshen, the former BLS commissioner under Obama. But, she adds, “This is a very unusual situation. There are lots of field staff who had a tried and true way of asking questions and they were doing what they were used to doing.”

The only political appointee at the BLS is the commissioner, who, Groshen said, does not have access to the data and only sees the finalized report.

This is a good one non-paywalled article that goes into depth:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/06/labor-bureau-says-misclassification-error-making-unemployment-rate-look-lower-it

[CurtEastPoint]

13. so...

[Newest Reality]

14. Does that mean...

Does that mean, then, that the Senate Reporkluklans will have to stop using the cooked numbers as a reason to withhold our stimulus?

[MyOwnPeace]

18. Oh, silly!

You KNOW that they can use whatever numbers they want to use to make it look like they really care (about the 1%).

[UTUSN]

22. K&R