Economists hail strong jobs report as jobless rate dips

[at140]

https://finance.yahoo.com/m/46ff54e3-5824-387a-a26c-27f11d38cc94/%27boom%21%27-economists-hail.html

Here's what economists are saying about the April employment data, showing a stronger-than-expected 263,000 new jobs created and the unemployment rate dropping to 3.6%. • Carl Tannenbaum of Northern Trust said it looked like a “goldilocks” performance, with strong payroll growth but modest year-over-year wage gains. • “The details of the report weren't quite so encouraging, with the decline in the unemployment rate driven largely by a fall in the labor force within the household survey, meanwhile on the establishment survey a slight tick down in average working hours meant that, despite the strong job growth, AGGREGATE HOURS WERE DOWN SLIGHTLY ON THE MONTH.


Yeah sure, unemployment rate is down because those who want jobs already have one, and others are too discouraged to look for jobs because pay and benefits are lousy.

[muntrv]

1. What's the under employment rate?

The repukes always asked that question when Obama was President.

[at140]

2. Good Question!

As I said in my footnote in OP, unemployment rate ignores all those who are not actively looking for jobs, for whatever reasons, such as lousy pay & benefits, skills not in demand, or health issues.

[progree]

5. U-6 is often called the under-employment rate, currently 7.2%

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS13327709

It counts people who have looked for work within the past 12 months (if beyond that: not counted).

It counts part-time workers who say they want full-time jobs as unemployed. (The voluntarily part-time employed are considered employed).

[BeyondGeography]

3. Earth to economists: We have an income relative to cost-of-living crisis

For the sake of your own relevance, you ought to try it sometime.

[at140]

4. Addition of 1 million++ legal immigrants every year

who are willing to work for lower wages is the reason many people have given up looking for jobs.
And of course if you are not actively looking for a job, gov't does NOT count you as unemployed.

[DonCoquixote]

6. you may not mean to say something

but you are feeding right into the narrative that legal immigration kills jobs. Be careful.

[at140]

7. Actually immigrants are expanding overall job numbers

But immigrants coming from many other countries are used to working for much lower wages than prevailing wage levels in US. For example IT programmers in India typically make less than 50% of US wages. They are happy to work in US for 75% of prevailing wages. Because they look at it as a 50% raise.

By hiring immigrants, US companies expand the economy which creates more jobs. So my hypothesis is that US wages are kept lower than they would be due to a million plus immigrants each year. That does not translate into killing US jobs, but simply constricting wage increases.