The Google Unemployment Index

The spike in July 2010 was the month long debate between republicans and democrats (and in the press) about The H.R.4213 - Unemployment Compensation Extension Act. http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h4213/show

Passed in Senate: July 20, 2010. Passed in Congress: July 22, 2010. Signed by President Obama: July 23, 2010.

http://www.worldcorrespondents.com/unemployment-extension-ju...

My guess is seasonal retail employees, who were hired just for the Christmas rush.

Another possibility is that the already un-/underemployed are simply not looking as hard for jobs toward the end of the year because the relative emotional warmth and focus on family typical of the "holiday season" (Thanksgiving to New Years in the US) distracts them from their job search.

It is also possible that white collar un-/underemployed aren't looking as hard during the holiday season because most offices are themselves so distracted by the holiday seasons. Anecdotally speaking, I've noticed a trend toward reduced hiring by companies during the the holidays.

Finally, purely speculative but American companies may tend to avoid firing people during the holidays. Firing someone before Xmas is one of those tropes that appears in television dramas and comedies and is often performed by the "evil boss". This myth likely has some basis in fact.

I run a jobs (entry level and internships) website, so I'm extremely familiar with this seasonal trend. I have a lot of data supporting the trend, but not a lot on why it exists.

I never really thought of the seasonal jobs thing because my site is focused on permanent full-time jobs/careers, but I'd bet it's at least part of the trend.

My hunch is that it's more related to New Year's Resolutions along with some other factors. Not a lot of hiring gets done between Thanksgiving and Christmas beyond seasonal jobs. Most companies lay low during that period, and some are also waiting for new budgets for the new year. Basically, companies wait until after the holidays to start hiring again, and most job seekers take a break during the holidays too. The trend also applies to internship searches, so that's why I think it's not just people looking for a new opportunity after seasonal employment ends.

How about because people are traveling and don't have a means to do Google searches?

A possible contributing factor just popped into my head, and only applies to a small subset of the tech industry. I know from experience that big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and undoubtedly many others, all have significant numbers of workers who are non-exempt contractors(i.e. not direct employees). I don't know how much labor laws vary from state to state, but in WA they are legally bared from employing these special contractors for longer than 11 months. After 11 months they have to convert them to direct employees. So in order to shirk the law and evade paying equal benefits, salaries, options, and corporate taxes, these companies dismiss those contractors for 30 days, then re-hire them. At least in Washington state, this is a standard practice for the past decade or so. There are many loop holes and exceptions, so I'm not even sure of the extent to which this contractor law is applicable.

At Microsoft or Amazon, at least a few years ago when I saw the HR numbers, at any given time, ~20% of the total pool of workers can be temp contractors, so that is a sizable numbers of workers coming and going each December, at least on paper, even if those workers stay on as contractors for many years. (As an aside, I've always wondered why this doesn't generate the same amount of bad PR as the entire video game industry, especially the "EA slave-ship").

I don't have nearly as much direct experience outside of the software industry, but I imagine other industries are doing likewise and on a far broader scale.

Extending this employment pattern to the whole economy, it might explain a big percentage of these mysterious to pin-down "seasonal workers." Or perhaps the labor statistics are just being fudged across the board(thanks US BLS!), from the top down, to try to keep a lid on the worsening unemployment and underemployment situation. I suspect it's a lot of both.

Since the 70's America has been hemorrhaging "real jobs"—i.e. non-service-sector jobs that actually pay an inflation adjusted living wage. Those of us fortunate enough to win the career lottery by going into tech have been quite shielded from the backdrop of the economic decline, and the mass exporting of (manufacturing mostly?) jobs to overseas.

I'm sure part of it is that employers don't like to lay people off before Christmas as it makes them seem heartless, so they queue up and dump a large group after the holidays.

That was my first question, so for now, I'm thinking of it as useful for analysis of only short time frames. The assumption here is that in a given 3-month period, the volume of searches is probably sufficiently similar.

This would break down near the end of the year in the USA when the volume of searches goes up as people shop online.

The stock market indices are declining starting mid-2007 just as the unemployment index starts rising. But,the markets seem to be holding ok even though the unemployment queries have started increasing of late.