“Ethical Markets will no longer post these monthly job numbers for the USA, as reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, every month, as in my “Current Issues and Trends”.
Instead, we will link directly to these each month. These are undergoing so many revisions and subject to the changing categories now under review due to rapidly changing structure of the US economy, Federal Reserve targets, the shrinking total of publicly-traded equities as companies spend trillions in buybacks of their own stock, questions on inflation and whether to use the Phillips Curve (I reported in my Politics of the Solar Age (1981) that the New Zealand economist, Phillips himself, did not think there was a “Phillips Curve”)!
This current official US jobs report for November, 2019 shows 266,000 new non-farm jobs created with an unemployment rate of 3.5 %. The labor force participation rate is still at 63.2% and the employment population ratio is unchanged at 61%. These official headline numbers record 4.3 million as part-time workers; 1.2 million marginally-attached to the workforce while now another group was dropped from the statistics: the 325,000 workers discouraged from seeking a job. The rise of the “gig” economy continues with millions holding down two or more jobs, (but with few or no benefits), while more people over 65 are back in the labor force to augment their retirement incomes. Average hourly earning of $28.29 have only increased by 3.1% over the past 12 months and are still outpaced by productivity and the general growth of the GDP. Thus, may alternative views put the overall unemployment rate much higher than the official 3.5%.
While we will now post these BLS monthly job reports on our LATEST HEADLINES, I will only update my “Current Issues and Trends” surveying the global geopolitical scene on an occasional basis, as circumstances change in major ways.
~Hazel Henderson, Editor-in-chief“