Semi-Daily Journal

The question remains - is temp hiring a signal of coming full-time employment gains, as it is traditionally interpreted, or is it a sign of cost shedding? Has the implication of temp hiring been stood on its head by a change in management practices?

"Unfortunately, we need payroll employment gains of 100,000 a month on average in order to keep the unemployment rate steady on average."

Unless most of the unemployed in the manufacturing sector give up on finding a job any time soon, in which case they will join the ranks of the "inactive population."

"The question remains - is temp hiring a signal of coming full-time employment gains, as it is traditionally interpreted, or is it a sign of cost shedding? Has the implication of temp hiring been stood on its head by a change in management practices?"

Interesting, I would interpret it as a sign of uncertainty on behalf of businesses.

I would also think that temp hiring is simply more common in the service sector than in the manufacturing sector, both because the latter is more unionized and perhaps because attrition nowadays may hurt service-sector employers less than manufacturing sector ones (?)

Finally, I would note that temp hiring is probably not good for phisical, financial and emotional health in most American families... Better than unemployment, but not a long-term solution, almost by definition...

I guess all these democrats are crying now because Bush might also fix the economy. No more complaints from Delong and Krugman.This is paradise

Trying to divine long-term trends from monthly data is silly. The data are insufficiently stable or reliable. How do you distinguish between an anomoly and a trend? Maybe we've turned the corner and everything will be great. Maybe we continue on a downward trend, but Sept was a blip.

John B,

If this has to be a partisan issue, well today"s reported job gain erases 2%-3% of the post-recession job loss. It is only 1-month's gain, and only adequate to absorb half (by Brad's estimate) to a third of the potential new entrants to the labor market in any month. So no, worry over the labor market won't evaporate.

So far, John B. the only thing Bush has fixed is the bank balances of his rich cronies.

If you had ever studied any economics, you'd realize that NOTHING HE DID had anything to do with today's slight lessening of the rate of increase in unemployment.

A question for all you economists:

One thing I noticed in the report was that they also released revised figures for August which showed that job losses in that month were not as bad as origionally reported. If memory serves (I am not an economist so I don't follow this stuff closely), adjusted figures for most of the year have been more positive than the initial reports.

Why is this? Are the initial reports designed to be conservative in order to avoid juicing the market with erroneous positive news? Or is it just chance - initial reports are inheretly innacurate and have just happened to fall on the negative side of the truth?

"If you had ever studied any economics, you'd realize that NOTHING HE DID had anything to do with today's slight lessening of the rate of increase in unemployment"
Chuck, sure it is the invisible hand of A Smith guiding us.Write again when you get to that chapter.Bye

I would expect a job market turnaround in this economic environment to occur in phases. From severe job loss to moderate job loss to moderate job growth and eventually, cross your fingers, to strong job growth. So I guess the question is whether this month's payrolls report is a display of the transition to moderate job growth. I am hopeful that it is. It is consistent with anecdotal evidence I have seen in the job market, improving corporate profits, and is reinforced by signs of economic upturn in Japan and Europe. Think we need several more months of payroll growth for hope to turn into confidence, but today's report is a good sign. Hey we're the most productive workers in the world so how about hiring a few more of us!

I note that this month, the news story concentrates on the results in the Payroll survey, not the Household survey. In the household survey, it looks like employment dropped 52000 from August to September, that unemployment went up 68000, and the number of dropouts from the labor force went up 257000.

There was discussion on this site of the differences between the two numbers. Still, it seems odd that the household survey has defaulted off the page.