Hacker News Reader

Comment by samfisher83 | Hacker News Reader

Unemployment is very low and we are adding jobs. I usually get 2-3 recruiters/week contacting me. However you do some seem some layoff stories too. I am wondering where these jobs are going.

View on HN

In the year over year employment by occupation stats, the unemployment rate for Management, professional, and related occupations and Sales and office occupations is a small bit higher but the overall number is still lower because of increased employment in production and service jobs.

Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t13.htm

Low unemployment is good for obvious reasons, but like the inverting of the yield curve rate, it's been a predictor of the last few recessions. After it bottoms and starts to move into an upwards trend a recession tends to follow.

Perhaps there is a lot of involuntary part-time employment (people want but can't get full-time jobs)? This would lower the unemployment numbers, but not accurately reflect many people's situations.

Not all jobs are equal. Are the jobs we are adding good ones? or desperate ones?

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/01/nonfarm-payrolls-january-201... : On a year-over-year basis, though, [wages] still amounted to a 3.2 percent increase, consistent with the past few months and around the highest levels of the recovery.

Higher wages are a good thing.

That's 1% wage growth after adjusting for inflation.

Fair enough, we should adjust for inflation.

From Brookings : "Real median household income grew roughly 1.6 percent in 2018" https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/01/31/household...

Median household income : $60K . $60K * 0.016 =$960.

$20/week

note the reason for using household income: it includes those who were previously unemployed. It's a way of blurring the line between the average person's earnings and unemployment. Of course if we want to know the unemployment rate, there are separate stats that clearly show that. The only reason to include it here is to make wage growth look better than it would otherwise.

Removing those who found a job, we get back to the lower 1% number. And a big part of that is people just working longer hours.

As rgbrenner noted, 1% growth after inflation. For the average salaried American that’s around $1/day increase. Not enough for a gallon of gas or a Starbucks coffee.

Desperate ones. But starting the year before last we finally got some wage pressure, which means the situation is going to improve slightly for a few moments before recession.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com