December 2, 2011   22 notes

Squashed: Where the jobs data comes from

But you are not a “participant” if you fall out of the survey pop - this is because people who lose benefits don’t get surveyed anymore.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by this—but I think it’s wrong.

If you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you need to do a few “job searching” things every week that more than qualify you to be part of the labor force. But your status on unemployment rolls doesn’t affect whether you get surveyed. That’s all random sample stuff.

That said, a 99er (or, really, a 103er because any action in the past four weeks counts) might be more-or-less phoning in the job search. If you decide around week 50 that you don’t really need a second income and that you don’t want to work, you might do a bare minimum of job searching to keep getting money—because, hey, it’s money. But once that’s done, you might fully drop out of the job market. So there might be some drop off after benefits expire.

But I don’t think that’s likely to be a large population. I think a more frequent situation is a case where, until recently, the husband was the sole bread winner. But he loses a job. Things get tight. Now the wife and teenage kid are all looking for jobs. Three people are unemployed. Then the husband (or maybe the wife) finds a job doing essentially what he was doing. The rest of the family stops looking. The labor force drops.

(via thecallus)

  1. awesomeocelot reblogged this from squashed
  2. squashed reblogged this from thecallus and added:
    thecallus writes, incorrectly:...This is probably news to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,...
  3. squashedcomments reblogged this from thecallus and added:
    I’m not quite sure what you mean by this—but I think it’s wrong. If you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you need to...
  4. This was featured in #Politics
  5. golden-notebook said: What I want to know is what KINDS of jobs are being added. Are they living wage jobs? Are they sustainable jobs, temporary jobs?
  6. squashed posted this