Today’s jobs report was UGLY! How when the US unexpectedly added 353K “jobs” – the most since January 2023. Remember, Biden is President. And apparenty El Presidente of Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Let me start with the official Biden jobs report versus the ADP jobs report from yesterday. BLS showed an amazing surge while ADP was sigalling a slowdown. Obviously, BLS is measuring employment differently (this is an election year after all). Like seasonal adjustments (always econometric voodoo).
But it’s more than just the Biden admin hanging its “success” on seasonal adjustments: when one digs deeper inside the jobs report, all sorts of ugly things emerge… such as the latest divergence between the Establishment (payrolls) and much more accurate Household (actual employment) survey. To wit, while in January the BLS claims 353K payrolls were added, the Household survey found that the number of actually employed workers dropped again, this time by 31K (from 161.183K to 161.152K).
This means that while the Payrolls series hits new all time highs every month since December 2020 (when according to the BLS the US had its last month of payrolls losses), the level of Employment has barely budged in the past year. Worse, as shown in the chart below, such a gaping divergence has opened between the two series in the past 4 years, that the number of Employed workers would need to soar by 9 million (!) to catch up to what Payrolls claims is the employment situation.
There’s more: shifting from a quantitative to a qualitative assessment, reveals just how ugly the composition of “new jobs” has been. Consider this: the BLS reports that in January 2024, the US had 133.1 million full-time jobs and 27.9 million part-time jobs. Well, that’s great… until you look back one year and find that in February 2023 the US had 133.2 million full-time jobs, or more than it does one year later! And yes, all the job growth since then has been in part-time jobs, which have increased by 870K since February 2023 (from 27.020 million to 27.890 million).
Here is a summary of the labor composition in the past year: all the jobs have been part-time jobs!
But wait there’s even more, because just as we enter the peak of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in January, the number of native-born worker tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 1.9 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 2 months!
Said otherwise, not only has all job creation in the past 4 years has been exclusively for foreign-born workers, but there has been zero job-creation for native born workers since July 2018!
This is a huge issue – especially at a time of an illegal alien flood at the border – and is about to become a huge political scandal, because once the inevitable recession finally hits, there will be millions of furious unemployed Americans demanding a more accurate explanation for what happened – i.e., the illegal immigration floodgates that were opened by the Biden admin.
Which is also why the Biden admin will do everything in his power to insure there is no official recession before November… and is why after the election is over, all economic hell will finally break loose. Until then, however, expect the jobs numbers to get more and more ridiculous.
I wonder if “Union Joe” is telling US labor union about no growth for native workers.