MSNBC: Jobless Rate Drops to Lowest Level in Almost Three Years

[bhikkhu]

93. The rawest number might be "total employed"

...which is the total number of jobs held by people earning wages. In Table A-1 from the BLS its a few columns down:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

about 141 million, and growing more or less steadily (depending on how you feel about seasonal adjustments).

...then the other raw number after that might be to see whether those new jobs aren't crappy part-time jobs, which they always mention in the monthly summary:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

where it notes the length of the average work week was unchanged for January. There's plenty of data in the BLS reports, useful for one thing or another. To some extent you are right that it can be plucked out and spun in any number of ways, but the total jobs is hard to spin, and I think more reliable as an indicator than some percentage of some selection, artificially made.