Tag: employment

Not Good

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The explosion of Covid-19 cases in the United States have just reversed the trend in initial unemployment claims.

This is not a surprise.

One wonders what happens when the supplemental unemployment payments end next week:

Filings for weekly unemployment benefits rose for the first time in nearly four months as some states rolled back reopenings because of the coronavirus pandemic, a sign the jobs recovery could be faltering.

Initial unemployment claims rose by a seasonally adjusted 109,000 to 1.4 million for the week ended July 18, the Labor Department said Thursday, halting what had been a steady descent from a peak of 6.9 million in late March, when the pandemic and business closures shut down parts of the U.S. economy.

The increase followed a period where claims had settled around 1.3 million a week, well above the pre-pandemic record of 695,000 in 1982.

This is going to get ugly.

1.3 Million

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It’s now 17 weeks straight of initial unemployment claims above 1 million.

People keep saying that this is good news, but this is horrible news:

About 1.3 million workers filed for unemployment insurance for the first time last week — the 17th straight week new claims exceeded 1 million as the coronavirus pandemic continues to drag down the economy.

Nearly 17.4 million workers were continually claiming unemployment insurance for the week ended July 4, the Labor Department said. Another 14.3 million people were claiming Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program newly created for self-employed or gig workers who are out of work at the moment, bringing the total number of people on all programs to 32 million unemployed.

“What we’re seeing is continued, historic elevated rates of job loss in the United States,” said Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. “We’ve seen sustained elevated rates of job loss, and that’s continued as we hurdle toward the expiration of several programs that have propped up the economy.”

The weekly filings decreased only slightly from the previous week, when 1.31 million workers filed for unemployment for the first time. They have steadily decreased from their high of 6.9 million filings for the week ended March 28, but the rate has slowed significantly in the past month.

………

In April, 5.5 percent of people who were unemployed reported permanent job losses. By June, that figure increased to 20 percent. In April, the top five jobs with the worst losses were those most directly affected by the virus and shutdowns: housekeepers and cleaners, waiters, retail workers, and cashiers, he found.

But by June, those jobs had shifted to other occupations, pointing to broader economic damage: carpenters, paralegals, managers, financial analysts and customer sales representatives.

Things are going in the wrong direction, and the extra $600/week in unemployment insurance is going away in 2 weeks.
Look out below.

And Now, The Other Trolls are Leaving the Times

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When James Bennet was finally defenestrated for going a troll to far for publishing Tom Cotton’s call to unleash the military on protesters, I wondered when the pet trolls that he hired would be out the door.

After all, both have horrible records on accuracy, as well as abusive behavior towards their cow-orkers at the New York Times.

Well, now we have an answer for Bari Weiss (יִמַּח שְׁמו), as about 5 weeks.

This is not a surprise. The Times staff found her toxic for doing things like excoriating real journalists at the paper, who were then forbidden by policy from responding, and reporting an editor for declining to have coffee with her.

Hoping that Bret “Bedbug” Stephens, who is if anything even more abusive in his behavior than Weiss, is not long for the paper either.

It is quite possible to hire conservative columnists who, though they might frequently misstate the facts (Brooks and Douthat come to mind) do not contribute to a toxic work environment.

Thursday Unemployment Numbers Still Suck

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It’s more than twice the record from before the Covid-19 shutdown started, 16 weeks of initial claims over a million.

Until we are well below a million initial claims, it’s folly to claim that their is a recovery going on:

Initial unemployment claims fell by a seasonally adjusted 99,000 to 1.3 million for the week ended July 4, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That extends a trend of gradual declines from a peak of 6.9 million in mid-March, when the coronavirus pandemic and mandated business closures shut down swaths of the U.S. economy. Still, last week’s level was well above the highest week on record before this year, which was 695,000 in 1982.

The number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits fell by nearly 700,000 to 18.1 million for the week ended June 27, the lowest reading since the week ended April 18. Those so-called continuing claims are reported with a week lag. The modest easing of the number of unemployment rolls suggests new layoffs are being offset by hiring and recalling of workers.

Employers added a combined 7.5 million jobs in May and June after shedding 21 million jobs in March and April, separate Labor Department data showed.

Claims fell in most states last week, including California and Florida, on a non-seasonally-adjusted basis, the Labor Department said. Claims did rise by 20,000 in Texas, 18,700 in New Jersey and by nearly 10,000 in Louisiana.

FWIW, the claims drop for Florida is highly suspect, as their unemployment system was intentionally broken by Governor Rick “Bat Boy” Scott.

Even now, the Florida unemployment trust fund is earning millions  in interest in delayed claims. (Also: Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.)

Given the corona virus explosion and the re-shutdown in Florida, it is simply inconceivable that that their claims fell.

Yeah, Not Surprised

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Revenue Increased Even During the Covid Shutdown

Dutch broadcaster NPO turned off trackers on its online videos, and their revenue went up.

Obviously, more data is necessary, but it does appear that the core business model of both Google and Facebook, that engaging in systematic and extensive stalking of people across the internet makes advertising more effective, may not be true:

Johnny Ryan, chief policy officer at privacy-focused browser biz Brave, has reported on how ad revenue increased when Dutch national broadcaster NPO stopped running third-party trackers on its online video website.

From a marketing perspective, targeted advertising is supposedly a dream realised: why waste money showing ads to people who are not likely to become customers? The success of Facebook is based on the ability of advertisers to define an audience by location, age, sex, personal interests and more.

………

Another idea is tracking the customer journey, from first seeing an ad to the final purchase. Great for marketing, but there are concerns about ad targeting based both on privacy and controversial matters like disinformation and manipulative political campaigns.

Ryan’s report questions the core assumption that targeted adverting is more effective. “In January 2020, when NPO switched from tracking-based targeting to contextual targeting, revenue increased 61 per cent more than January 2019. In February, revenue increased 76 per cent over the previous year,” he wrote.

Contextual targeting is the old-school approach of showing ads related to the content around them, such as displaying holiday advertising alongside travel features. Search engine DuckDuckGo relies on this, saying: “When you search on DuckDuckGo, we can show you an ad based on the keywords you type in. That’s it.”

The research is based on a report by STER (Stichting Ether Reclame), the company that manages advertising for NPO, which was presented at the Computer Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) 2020 conference held in Brussels in January. The big question: how is it that contextual advertising can bring in more revenue for the publisher?

The answer may be more to do with the nature of the adtech industry than the effectiveness of the ads themselves. STER says that non-personalised ads are “just as effective”, measured by number of clicks an ad attracts, though the click-through is not a complete analysis of effectiveness.

………

How much is this cut? Ryan refers to a 2016 report in which The Guardian said that “a lot of the money that [advertisers] think they are giving to premium publishers is not actually getting to us.”

In the worst case, only 30 per cent of the money paid by the advertiser reaches the publisher, according to the report. This means contextual advertising is potentially much more profitable for publishers, even if the ads themselves are somewhat less effective. According to Ryan, RTB “is a cancer eating the heart of legitimate media, and a business model for the bottom of the web.” The suggestion, therefore, is not so much that targeted advertising never works, but rather that a greedy adtech industry, along with the impact of privacy concerns, is giving publishers an incentive to return to plain old contextual advertising.

This is potentially a very big deal if we can find more examples of this, because it strikes at the core of Facebook and Google’s business model.

On a broader level, the collection and analysis of data when there is no benefit to the final results is endemic in society.

It’s why we see the testing mania in public schools, and the explosion of administrative positions in secondary education, where there are armies of people being recruited to perform what are essentially Bullsh%$ Jobs.

This Is Going to Be Ugly

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It now appears that office rents in Manhattan are set to fall by more than a quarter.

Considering the leverage of most developers, and the relatively short term of real estate loans, they typically have to be refinanced every 5 years, we are looking at a huge number of bad loans popping up in the not too distant future:

Manhattan’s office rents are likely to plummet to the lowest level since 2012 if the U.S. economy doesn’t recover quickly from the pandemic.

Asking rents could decline 26% to about $62.47 a square foot (roughly $672 per square meter) in a prolonged recession, according to a report from Savills. Rents haven’t fallen to that level since 2012, the real estate services firm said.

………
Savills’ research used indicators that it says are correlated to rental rates, including gross domestic product, unemployment and office vacancies in Manhattan.

Also, there is going to be a f%$# load of work from home which is likely to permanently depress office demand, because literally hundreds of thousands employers have discovered that you don’t have to have someone in the office 5 days a week. and that it saves them a fair chunk of change.

1½ Million for the 3rd Week in a Row

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Not Good

Initial unemployment claims remained at 1.5 million, worse than had been predicted.

This is not a “V-Shaped” recovery:

The number of workers seeking jobless benefits has held steady at about 1.5 million each week so far in June, signaling a slow recovery for the U.S. economy as states face new infections that could impede hiring and consumer spending.

Applications for unemployment benefits were slightly below 1.5 million last week, at 1.48 million, the Labor Department reported Thursday. While weekly totals have gradually eased from a late March peak of nearly 7 million, they also remain well above the prepandemic record of 695,000 in 1982.

Meanwhile, the number of people receiving benefits, an indicator for overall layoffs, totaled 19.5 million in the week ended June 13, down slightly from previous weeks.

Economists say the sluggish improvements in claims tallies dim prospects for a quick recovery. Further, a recent increase in coronavirus cases could affect efforts to reopen the economy—and get people back to work and spending money.

Doing the Right Thing for the Basest of Reason

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This is driven by bigotry and politics, with Covid-19 being used as a pretext, but it is the right thing to do.

The visas in question, H-1B, L-1A, etc. are intended to bring in people who with skills that are unavailable in the United States.

In reality, it’s primarily about getting cheap foreign workers into the country, with foreign body shops like Infosys and Tata being the largest users of the program.

The tech companies are screaming that the sky is falling, but they will be able to get what they need, they will just need to pay a few bucks more an hour:

President Trump issued a proclamation Monday barring many categories of foreign workers and curbing immigration visas through the end of the year, moves the White House said will protect U.S. workers reeling from job losses amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The ban expands earlier restrictions, adding work visas that many companies use, especially in the technology sector, landscaping services and the forestry industry. It excludes agricultural laborers, health-care professionals supporting the pandemic response and food-service employees, along with some other temporary workers.

The restrictions will prevent foreign workers from filling 525,000 jobs, according to the administration’s estimates. The measures will apply only to applicants seeking to come to the United States, not workers who already are on U.S. soil.

“American workers compete against foreign nationals for jobs in every sector of our economy, including against millions of aliens who enter the United States to perform temporary work,” the proclamation states. “Under ordinary circumstances, properly administered temporary worker programs can provide benefits to the economy. But under the extraordinary circumstances of the economic contraction resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak, certain nonimmigrant visa programs authorizing such employment pose an unusual threat to the employment of American workers.”

In fact, these problems have always posed a threat to American workers and American workers’ wages.

The real goal of these programs has been to supply cheap tech labor since before I graduated from college. (I literally had someone in an unemployment office in 1982 tell me not to bother, because H-1B job postings were not a real job opening.)

I expect this to be reversed shortly after the election, but this moratorium will provide an opportunity to show that there is no real STEM shortage, and this is a good thing.

Have You Heard of the Hostile Workplace?

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I’m working from home 3 days a week right now, and I have an excessively affectionate workplace.

It’s not Sharon* though, it’s the cats.

Today, I could not go more than 15 minutes before Meatball (the little queen) jumping up on my lap, or Destructo (the BIG Tom) nuzzling my elbow in a quest for affection and attention.

I’m sure that I am not the only one who has experienced this.

It’s surreal.

*Love of my life, light of the  cosmos, she  who must be obeyed, my wife.

Nope, No Racism Here

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Whites Only

At the Ramsey jail in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the jail was specifically excluding black officers from having any contact with infamous murderer cop Derek Chauvin.

I really could not imagine them doing this for a non-cop, or for a black cop:

Staff members working at the jail that held Derek Chauvin, the white officer charged with murder in the killing of George Floyd, say that only white employees were allowed to guard him when he was first brought to the facility last month.

Eight officers have filed complaints with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, saying that the superintendent of the Ramsey County jail in St. Paul kept them from bringing Mr. Chauvin to his cell — or even being on the same floor as him — last month, solely because of their race.

The officers, half of whom are black and all of whom are people of color, said the orders from the superintendent, Steve Lydon, who is white, amounted to segregation and indicated that he thought they could not be trusted to do their jobs because they are not white.

After initially denying that officers’ contact with Mr. Chauvin had been determined by race, a spokesman for the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office acknowledged the move this weekend and said Mr. Lydon had been temporarily removed from the superintendent role as the sheriff investigates the officers’ claims.

Roy Magnuson, the spokesman, provided a statement that he said Mr. Lydon gave to investigators. In it, Mr. Lydon said he had decided to keep nonwhite employees away from Mr. Chauvin because he believed having people of color interact with him could have “heightened ongoing trauma.” He said he had only done so on short notice and for 45 minutes before realizing that he had made a mistake, after which he reversed the order and apologized. Officers said it had lasted longer — affecting one shift two days later — and that not enough had been done in response.

The discrimination complaints, which were first reported by The Star Tribune, were the latest instance in which correctional officials have been accused of giving preferential treatment to a white inmate. Some activists have for years argued that officers were too kind to Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., when they placed him in a bulletproof vest and bought him food from Burger King. Critics said that a black suspect in a similar crime would not have gotten the same treatment.

In this case, one of the officers said in his complaint that he had seen, on the jail’s cameras, a white lieutenant let Mr. Chauvin use her phone inside his cell, a violation of the facility’s policy. Mr. Magnuson said the Sheriff’s Office was opening an internal investigation into that claim.

Gee, what a surprise, racist supervisors in a law enforcement agency.  Hoocoodanode?

Is Work from Home the New Normal?

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If this is the new normal, it presages a major change in the workplace, at least the office workplace, though I have no clue as to what the end-state would be.  ¯_(ツ)_/¯

New York City will allow companies to reopen their offices on Monday after a three-month lockdown from the pandemic. Few employees seem ready or willing to go back.

Most companies are taking a cautious approach. Some are keeping offices closed, while others are opening them at reduced occupancy and allowing employees to decide if they prefer to keep working from home. Mary Ann Tighe, chief executive for the tri-state region at real-estate services firm CBRE Group Inc., said many New York City clients don’t plan on being fully back in the office before Labor Day. And maybe only then if schools have reopened.

Companies are worried about another wave of infections, Ms. Tighe said. Some are also concerned about commuting bottlenecks, if more drivers lead to traffic jams or public transit limits the number of riders. Lower maximum occupancy in elevators could also lead to lines.

New York real-estate brokers and landlords say they anticipate only 10% to 20% of Manhattan’s office workers will return on Monday, though they expect that figure to increase gradually over the summer. Traders at financial-services companies are eager to return, these people say, but most of their other employees are staying away. Tech and creative companies are also taking their time.

Potentially, this could mean a number of things:

  • Reduced demand for office space.
  • Fewer positions in middle-management.
  • Reductions in traffic and commuting time.
  • Human Sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

OK, maybe not that last one, but if the demand for office space in the center city drops long term by more than a few percent, it could be the genesis of another banking or real estate crisis.

A Huge Part of the Problem

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One of the reasons that police have become a hyper-militarized occupying power is that police hiring increasingly draws from the military.

This means that rather than attempting to protect and serve, police increasingly attempt to, “Dominate the battlespace,” which is antithetical to proper policing:

Calls for the demilitarization of police have gained new prominence in the light of the latest wave of anti-police brutality protests sweeping the United States. But in a country where one-fifth of the police force is ex-military — including George Floyd’s killer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, and Robert McCabe, one of the two officers responsible for knocking down Martin Gugino, the seventy-five-year-old protester in Buffalo — demilitarization won’t come easy.

Many police officers are themselves former members of the military who picked up a career in policing after returning from war zones. But this isn’t the only problem. Loaded down with cast-off gear from the Pentagon — body armor, bayonets, automatic rifles, grenade launchers, armored vehicles, and surveillance drones — police officers are more likely to regard peaceful protestors as enemy combatants, particularly when the Pentagon’s own top official refers to their protest scenes as “battlespace.”

But getting police officers out of the business of being an occupying military force —whether perpetually or in times of crisis — will also require much closer screening of job applicants who are veterans and elimination of their favored treatment in police department hiring.

………

Policing is the third most common occupation for men and women who served in the military. It is an option widely encouraged by career counselors and veterans’ organizations like the American Legion. As a result, several hundred thousand veterans are now wearing a badge of some sort. Though veterans comprise just 6 percent of the US population, veterans now working in law enforcement number 19 percent of the total force. Their disproportionate representation is due, in part, to preferential hiring requirements, mandated by state or federal law. In addition, under the Obama administration, the Department of Justice provided local police departments with tens of millions of dollars to fund veterans-only positions.

As noted by the Marshall Project in its 2017 report, “When Warriors Put On the Badge,” this combination of hiring preferences and special funding has made it harder to “build police forces that resemble and understand diverse communities.” The beneficiaries have been disproportionately white, because 60 percent of all enlisted men and women are not people of color.

………

Tougher to tackle is the issue of ex-military personnel being over-represented in the ranks of domestic law enforcers. When you leave the service, says Danny Sjursen, a West Point graduate who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, “there’s no de-programming…They just load you up on meds and then you go straight to the police academy.” According to Sjursen, “military-style of policing is based on notion that high-crime areas should be treated like occupied countries.” So the “military-to-police pipeline” increases the chances “that a guy comes back to Baltimore, Camden, or Detroit and functions the same way we did when occupying Kabul or Baghdad.”

1½ Million New Claims

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It’s Thursday, which means that we have new unemployment claims for the past week, and it’s 1.5 million for the 2nd week in a row:

Businesses are reopening after coronavirus shutdowns, governments are easing restrictions, and workers are gradually returning to their jobs. But the layoffs keep coming.

Another 1.5 million people applied for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, while 760,000 more filed new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal emergency program that extends benefits to self-employed workers, independent contractors and others who don’t qualify for standard benefits.

It was the 13th straight week that filings topped one million. Until the present crisis, the most new claims in a single week had been 695,000, in 1982.

………

Economists said the current layoffs, though smaller than the wave in March and early April, were in some ways more worrying because they suggested that the crisis was reaching deeper into the economy even as lockdowns eased.

Gee, you think?

BTW, this was more claims than had been predicted.

D’Oh! I Missed This Yesterday

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Not Good

Initial unemployment claims fell to a still horrifying high 1.5 million.

When the number drops below ½ million, we can start to talk about having a meaningful recovery.

As it stands, we still have not seen the full knock-on effects for April and May:

The number of people seeking unemployment benefits continued to fall while those receiving them appeared to plateau, signs the U.S. labor market continues to slowly mend from the coronavirus employment shock.

The ranks of Americans drawing on unemployment benefits declined slightly in the week ended May 30 to 20.9 million, the Labor Department said Thursday. So-called continuing claims remain historically high—the prepandemic record was 6.6 million in 2009—and appear to have stabilized in recent weeks after peaking in early May.

Though states continue to work through a backlog of claims, new applications for unemployment benefits have trended down since the coronavirus pandemic and related lockdowns triggered a surge in claims at the end of March. About 1.5 million applications were filed last week, compared with a peak of nearly 7 million in the week ended March 28.

Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Live by the Troll, Die by the Troll

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Following the backlash soliciting and publishing an opinion piece from Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) where he called for the use of the active military to use lethal force against protesters, James Bennet has been fired as Opinion Editor.

They claim that this is a “resignation” but make no mistake, it was a firing.

Bennet thought that his role as editor was to publish cartoonish trolls for click-throughs, typified by his hiring of Bret “Bedbug” Stephens and Bari “Shanda fur die Goyim” Weiss.

He finally went a troll too far:

James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York Times, days after the newspaper’s opinion section, which he oversaw, published a much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.

“Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years,” said A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher, in a note to the staff on Sunday announcing Mr. Bennet’s departure.

In a brief interview, Mr. Sulzberger added: “Both of us concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change that is required.”

This is not what one calls a conciliatory statement.  Sulzberger basically called him out as incompetent when explaining why he was fired.

Ouch.

Here’s hoping that Stephens and Weiss head out the door as well, particularly the former, as Stephens has made it a practice to harry and intimidate anyone who criticizes him.  (Bedbug story here.)

This entire affair does appear to imply that the New York Times is a tremendously toxic place to work.

The New York Times has Turned Into a Complete Sh%$ Show

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The New York Times published an OP/ED by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) that called for the activity military to come in to put down the anti-police brutality protests with guns blazing.

Needless to say, the Times staffers, prticularly those of color,  have completely lost their sh%$ over this, stating (correctly IMHO) that this put staffers, particularly staffers of color:

The internal fallout from the New York Times’ decision to run an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, which called for the U.S. military to be deployed to American cities to crack down on protests against police killings of Black people, continued apace on Friday during a company all-hands meeting.

Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Chief Operating Officer Meredith Levien all offered opening statements. But as always, the most informative parts of the meeting came from the lengthy question-and-answer portion. Staffers asked for an autopsy of the piece and how it was published; if company leaders were planning to address James Bennet’s leadership of the opinion section, which has had “several misfires”; whether Opinion staff editor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for “openly bad mouth[ing] younger news colleagues on a platform where they, because of strict company policy, could not defend themselves”; whether the opinion section had suggested the topic of the op-ed to Cotton; and what the Times would do to help retain and support Black employees.

The newsroom first revolted Wednesday, shortly after the op-ed was published. Dozens of staffers tweeted a variation of the phrase “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger,” along with a screenshot of the op-ed’s headline. The paper’s union put out a statement about the column as well.

In a development that can only be described as mind boggling, Bennet said that, “He had not read Mr. Cotton’s essay before it was published,” even though it is clear from the Times own account that there was extensive review and editing from inside the editorial division.

Fire Editor-in-Chief Dean Banquet and Opinion Editor James Bennet, and for good measure, have them take Bret “Bedbug” Stevens, whose hobby appears to be threatening reporters on the news side of the paper, with them.

I Did Not See This Coming

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The Scariest Job Chart Ever

The unemployment rate for May unexpectedly fell to 13.3% in May.

This surprised pretty much everyone, with the consensus being an increase to nearly 20%:

The U.S. labor market snapped back to life in May, restoring a chunk of the jobs it lost in the first two months of the coronavirus pandemic while facing big obstacles in the months ahead.

After two months of carnage, employers added 2.5 million jobs last month, the most jobs added in a single month on records dating from 1948. The jobless rate fell to 13.3% from April’s 14.7%, a post-World War II high.

Employment remained down by nearly 20 million jobs, or 13%, since February, the month before the pandemic prompted states to shut down huge segments of their economies. By comparison, the U.S. shed about 9 million jobs between December 2007 and February 2010, a period that covered the recession caused by the financial crisis.

It should be noted that the unemployment rate would have risen to over 16% but for a statistical artifact:

When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.

The special note said that if this “misclassification error” had not occurred, the “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” meaning the unemployment rate would be about 16.3 percent for May.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs reports, said it was working to fix the problem.

………

Some took this as a sign that President Trump or one of his staffers may have tinkered with the data to make it look better, especially since most forecasters predicted the unemployment rate would be close to 20 percent in May, up from 14.7 percent in April. But economists and former BLS leaders from across the political spectrum strongly dismissed that idea.

………

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.”

………

The “other reason” category is normally used for people on vacation, serving jury duty or taking leave to care for a child or relative. These are typically situations where the worker decides to take leave. But in this unusual pandemic circumstance, the “other reason” category was applied to some people staying at home and waiting to be called back.

This problem started in March when there was a big jump in people claiming they were temporarily “absent” from work for “other reasons.” The BLS noticed this and flagged it right away. In March, the BLS said the unemployment rate likely should have been 5.4 percent, instead of the official 4.4 percent rate. In April, the BLS said the real unemployment rate was likely about 19.7 percent, not 14.7 percent.

The situation is still dire, and one hopes that this issue will lead to better statistics on employment in the futurer.

Another 1.9 Million New Jobless Claims

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While this is better than the 6 million claims at the peak of the pandemic this week’s jobless report of 1.9 million claims is still almost three times worst than any weekly claims report before this year.

Tomorrow’s unemployment number is going to be grim:

Another 1.9 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week as the total number of claims passed 42 million since the coronavirus pandemic hit the US.

The pace of layoffs has slowed dramatically from its peak of 6.6m at the start of April as states start to relax quarantine orders and last week was the ninth consecutive week of declines. But the scale of layoffs remains staggeringly high. In the worst week of the last recession “just” 665,000 people filed for unemployment.

Jason Reed, professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said the numbers may be coming down, but “this is unprecedented. The figures are so high that it’s hard to grasp the reality.”

On Friday the labor department will release May’s monthly jobs report. Economists are predicting unemployment will rise to close to 20% from 14.7% in April and some 8m more jobs will have been lost after a combined drop of 21.4m in March and April.

Tomorrow is going to be very grim.

“Only” 2.1 Million New Jobless Claims

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Yes, “Only”, 3 times as many initial claims as had ever been filed before 2020.

That’s just great:

The number of workers receiving unemployment benefits fell for the first time since February and new weekly claims continued to ease, offering evidence that layoffs related to the coronavirus pandemic are slowing.

Initial claims for unemployment benefits declined to a seasonally adjusted 2.1 million last week from 2.4 million the prior week, the Labor Department said. The level of claims is still 10 times prepandemic levels but has fallen for eight straight weeks.

Because employers are running out of people to lay off.

I will note that the recovery is not likely to be strong, because the people who are looking for work won’t have the resources to buy sh%$ once they find a new job.