Employers Added Just 98,000 Jobs in March Below Expectations of 180,000 (usatoday.com)

Employers slowed their pace of hiring while the unemployment rate fell to the lowest level in almost a decade in March, highlighting steady but sometimes mixed progress across the labor market. From a report on USA Today: Payroll growth weakened significantly last month amid harsher winter weather as employers added 98.000 jobs in a sharper pullback than anticipated. The unemployment rate, which is calculated from a different survey, fell to 4.5% from 4.7%, the Labor Department said Friday. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg projected 180,000 employment gains, based on their median estimate. Analysts expected some payback in March after unseasonably mild temperatures pulled forward hiring to early in the year, especially in sectors such as construction, resulting in 200,000-plus job gains in January and February. And a snowstorm that slammed into the Midwest and East Coast in mid-March likely further curtailed job growth, says economist Jim O'Sullivan of High Frequency Economics. [...] But some economists also have said the outsize job gains early this year defied a low unemployment rate that's supplying businesses a shrinking pool of available workers. Many analysts expect that trend ultimately to result in average monthly job gains of about 170,000 this year, down from 187,000 last year and 226,000 in 2015.

Comments

We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[Joe_Dragon]

We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

or someone willing to work 60-80 hours a week in the bay area for 60K

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[Nidi62]

At a point, being wealthier doesn't really help you, because you buy all these toys but you work all the time and don't have any leisure hours to play with them.

You don't buy all those toys to play with them. You buy all those toys because someone else at the country club bought them, and because Bob down the street doesn't own them and you want him to be jealous. Or did you think they actually used those extra 2 kitchens and 4 bedrooms, or the Olympic sized swimming pool with waterfall and and built-in grill that would give Bobby Flay wet dreams? That's why they have to lease the newest Range Rover, Porsche, or BMW every 2 years. Once you reach a certain threshold, toys aren't meant to be used, they're meant to be seen.

Re: We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[number6x]

January and February of 2017 were also down from the 2016 and 2015 numbers. Sean Spicer was talking about how great Trump's numbers were, until it was pointed out that Obama did better.

Of course it's all probably just fake news or alt-facts or aliens or something.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[DickBreath]

Are robotic worker units allowed to be counted as jobs?

It wounds better to say we created X number of jobs than to say we downsized X human beings and replaced them with foreign made robots that don't get sick, strike, complain, want raises and benefits, or make crazy demands for humane working conditions and safety.

Replacing people with robots is like printing money! Or burning fossil fuels. It can be done forever without any consequences! It's great!

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[bluefoxlucid]

Rich people take vacations and private jet flights. Middle-classers just up-size their house from 982sqft (1950 average new single-family home size) to 2,300sqft (2000 size) and try to figure on when they can play all their XBox games.

Generally, we've gotten bigger houses and apartments to store our computers, tablets, kitchen appliances, washing machines, 6 TVs (one in every room), guitars, bicycles, fancy lamps, and so forth. We've also started to eat at McDonalds a lot, because who has time to cook? If we cooked, we couldn't watch all that anime on Netflix.

Re: We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[Type44Q]

Your meaningless jabber would be a little more bearable if it didn't smell like dick...

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[Nidi62]

Generally, we've gotten...6 TVs (one in every room)....We've also started to eat at McDonalds a lot, because who has time to cook? If we cooked, we couldn't watch all that anime on Netflix.

I solved that problem by putting a TV in the kitchen ;)

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[swillden]

efficiency improvements would normally lead to sharp population expansion

Huh? Humans are not rabbits. All evidence shows that the wealthier we get, the fewer children we have.

Re: We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[fluffernutter]

I'd be more worried about the fake war he is starting with Russia.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[Maxo-Texas]

It's odd tho.. it takes me less time to cook and clean up from a meal that costs less than mcdonalds at home and would cost me $40 if I ate out.

Wild caught salmon...
Put over a low heat in some olive oil or butter with a bit of seasoning of the day on top and perhaps a line of mayo. Place in veggies around the edge of the skilliet. Set timer for 8 minutes. Turn salmon at 8 minutes. Set timer for 4 minutes. Test that it's 'flaky' at 12 minutes and that the veggies are tender. Transfer to plate. Put 1/8" of water into pan, lightly boil, wipe pan clean.
Crack open a nice chardonnay or make a martini.

Vs...

Drive to mcdonalds/wendy's/taco bell* for 8 minutes. Order and wait for 8 minutes. Drive home for 8 minutes.
Put 12 miles on the car- probably use quarter gallon of gasoline- risk an accident.

*But not burger king. I got some coupons last month and that food is nasty and almost pure carbs. I don't know how they stay in business.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[sexconker]

What if you're watching an anime cooking show while you're cooking? I don't think there are any on Netflix, though.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[bluefoxlucid]

No, all evidence shows that when an individual human unit gets wealthier, it slows its rapid breeding. Humans don't need to produce more children when fewer die out, either, as a society.

As a population, a human society includes a gradient of wealth. The expansion of that society causes scarcity pressures, which eventually limit that expansion. Those limits are felt at different levels in different ways.

Think about food. If you have fertile land in good climate to produce food for 10,000,000 people, and have a population of 5,000,000, what happens if you raise your population by 20%? You add 1,000,000 people. You've still got the same specifications for making food: if you have to expend 10% of your population to make food, then before you had 500,000 people working on food production (farmers, fertilizer chemists, shipping, tractor makers, tool makers, etc.), and now you have an additional 100,000.

With that expansion, there's 20% more food, 20% more people, and 20% more hours of each type of labor going into making the food. The cost per unit of food required for each person is unchanged.

Now what happens if you have 10,000,000 people and bump by 20%?

You now have 2,000,000 more people to feed, and you have to farm on less-viable land. You need more irrigation and more fertilizer. You get lower yield, so need to farm over a wider span of land. That means more farm hands, more seeding, and an increase in all inputs (e.g. you need more fuel for the tractors, more water irrigating that whole span, twice the fertilizer to handle twice the land area, etc.).

Up to now, 2 million people required 200,000 laborers to make food. Now it requires 400,000 for these additional 2 million mouths to feed. That means the marginal cost of food is higher--in total, 11.67% instead of 10% of your population works on making food.

That means 1.67% of your income which was spent on other things is instead spent on food production. Those other things aren't made (less wealth) because they can't be bought. For rich people, this is essentially-unimportant: food requirements are generally constant, and rich people buy more-expensive food (pay for additional luxury) and so have both flexibility and an existing deep investment in luxury--and they still pay a very small portion of their income for food, even if they're eating caviar and lobster.

As you get into middle-class and poor, this increase in the cost of food reduces wealth substantially. The middle-class feel poorer; the poorest can't afford to eat. Because of this pressure, they also don't have the capacity to rear families, and will tend to slow down population growth.

As shown by history, resolving this scarcity pressure causes a population increase. This has been demonstrated as recently as 2006, where the recession caused slowed population growth in the United States, and the reduction of unemployment lead to a notable but small increase in population growth (see 2008-2012 versus the employment-population ratio and the unemployment rate as indicators of factors impacting how Americans perceive their access to financial stability). Back in the early 1900s, scarcity of food in particular lead to development of new fertilizers and intensive farming techniques; since the 1950s, world population has been on a sharper upward trend. It keeps happening.

A sharp increase in the sense of stability among family-minded Americans who would like to start a family or have a larger family but who don't feel they can afford it right now will lead to the obvious: sudden financial stability, the perceived capacity to enlarge their family as they've always dreamed, and more children. So it is, so it's always been.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[Opportunist]

Wealth isn't freedom. You become a slave of your wealth if you allow yourself to be one. Because you become paranoid, others could want to steal your wealth, you start to worry, you start to protect it, and most of all you start to fear that it may be gone. What you are looking for is security. Security that you have food and shelter tomorrow, even if you for some reason cannot work anymore. That can be accomplished far easier than by accumulating tons of money. I (and everyone in my country) has that security. And few of them are wealthy in a monetary sense.

If you need to first amass a lot of money to get that level of security, I can only pity you, you poor, poor man.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[ShanghaiBill]

All evidence shows that the wealthier we get, the fewer children we have.

Only some evidence shows that.
Until about 50 years ago, wealth meant more children.
So what changed?
1. Contraceptives
2. Rapidly falling infant and childhood mortality
3. Increasing urbanization

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[bluefoxlucid]

That works after you've put in the time to learn to cook, which involves some planning. Most people aren't thinking that far ahead.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[OrangeTide]

I probably have 8 TVs in my house. Every LCD and Laptop is a TV. Some of my "TVs" have RF tuners, others are WiFi, but I can watch programs on any of them.

Re: We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[nospam007]

"I'd be more worried about the fake war he is starting with Russia."

Or China. The Chinese president closed tens of thousands of golf clubs/courses and forbade 46000 high Party members to play that 'game for millionaires'.
And nothing offends them more than losing face.

And orange Hitler invites him to a golf club.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[OSS542]

And how might we, as you put it, more easily accomplish this ? I'm afraid I missed that part.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[swillden]

All evidence shows that the wealthier we get, the fewer children we have.

Only some evidence shows that. Until about 50 years ago, wealth meant more children. So what changed? 1. Contraceptives 2. Rapidly falling infant and childhood mortality 3. Increasing urbanization

And female education. That seems also to play a very significant role.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[swillden]

Global data pretty clearly demonstrates that we've reached a point where increasing wealth (and especially female education) slows population growth. Indeed, we've already passed the point of peak childbirth; fewer children are born every year and that trend has been continuing for the last 30 years. The only reason population is currently growing -- as wealth continues to increase -- is because we're filling out the age brackets.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[Maxo-Texas]

It's a fair point about the ingredients but my time at mcdonalds is often over 8 minutes-- I was being generous for symmetry. If there is just one person ahead of me they can easily take a few minutes to order.

However, shopping takes me about 30 minutes a week tho. That's a fair point. So add that to the time. Fair enough. 21 meals / 30 minutes-- say 90 seconds per meal (rounding up to 45 minutes for shopping?).

The meal from mcdonalds/wendys/taco bell is still tasty, unhealthy, and expensive compared to home cooking.

And it's Sooooo simple. For the most part, cook meats for 8 minutes over a low heat, turn, cook for 3-4 minutes and you are done. Cooking over a low heat means for the 8 minutes- you don't even have to pay attention to the meal and you can cook the vegetables for free. And it's a lot more healthy than fast food (high carbs, high sodium, other problems).

And as long as you put water in the skillet right away while it is still hot - it's trivial cleanup.

Cooking with HIGH heat causes a problem with cleanup, burns the food, and forces you to pay close attention to the meal.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[Opportunist]

By spreading the risk. I don't need to accumulate wealth myself if I can rely on society's ability to catch me if I fall.

In the end it's way more sensible because not everyone will suddenly lose a limb and be unable to work anymore, so in total we need to accumulate way less wealth just to take care of "just in case" cases.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[bluefoxlucid]

So global statistics show population growth is slowing even though we're still growing population faster than ever because population won't really stop growing until it stops growing?

History has shown, and continues to show, that advances in technology reduce scarcity, and that reduction in scarcity directly causes a population boom. Reduction in scarcity is wealth. It's the capacity to feed 7 billion people on a planet that can sustain 0.63 billion humans. It's the capacity to have cars, roads, and rail lines when medieval society couldn't build all that shit in 100 years even if given the industrial population we have. It's the capacity to afford a wardrobe of clothes--you know, rich people things, since people who aren't the Nobility can't produce enough to make it economically viable for most people to own more than one or two sets of good clothes (which eventually get torn up and used as rags, because throwing things like that away is ludicrous).

This is what you're seeing throughout history.

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[swillden]

So global statistics show population growth is slowing even though we're still growing population faster than ever because population won't really stop growing until it stops growing?

No. Global statistics show that the annual total number of births has been steadily declining since the late 80s. Population is growing only because the global population skews young, and we're in the process of filling out the age groups. Hans Rosling explained it very well in this TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:We need more H1B's* to fill the gaps

[swillden]

BTW, if you don't want to watch the whole video (though I highly recommend it; Rosling does a great job of making dry statistics interesting), you can start at 10:15 for the most relevant part.

Meanwhile

[110010001000]

Another terrorist attack in Sweden.

Re:Meanwhile

[sexconker]

Binary guy is correct for once.

Both factually (Google it - "In what appeared to be a terrorist attack, a truck plowed into a crowd on a street and crashed into a department store in central Stockholm on Friday.") and rhetorically (this Anti-Trump spin job of a headline attached to a fairly neutral summary is far less significant than another terrorist attack in fragile Europe).

Re:Meanwhile

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Binary guy is pretty incorrect, on both dimensions.

Sure there was a terrorist attack in Sweden, but the problem is with the term "another". Yes, there have been past terrorist attacks, but the implication was clearly referencing to the non-existant terrorist attacks Trump spoke of earlier this year as what is "another" to.

And what anti-Trump spin? The numbers were half the prediction. That's pretty dramatic. And the name "Trump" and title "President" appear nowhere.

is far less significant than another terrorist attack in fragile Europe

Well, I would actually disagree on importance from a national level; two people dying is a tragedy, but hardly likely to change anything on a national level. Beyond that, the attack was featured on the front page of the NYTimes and the Washington Post, so...

This is Obama's fault.

[pteddy]

Sad!

Re:ADP said 230,000

[PopeRatzo]

Yet the government, who hates Trump, reports 98,000.

That number came from Trump's labor department.

Re:ADP said 230,000

[naubol]

I can see why you think corporations are more trustworthy than any government entity ever, after all, you were relentlessly told not to trust government by a media corporation, yes?

Shag the Dog

[PopeRatzo]

Yet the government, who hates Trump, reports 98,000.

They also revised that "magnificent" February jobs number...downward.

There must be some middle-eastern country we can bomb.

Re:Thanks Obama

[naubol]

Oh these early months are not worth bickering about. Like the quote about the stock market, "In the short term, it's a voting machine. In the long term, it's a weighing machine." We'll see what happens over the next 4-8 years. And, there will be two hundred thousand explanations for it, only a few of them driven by carefully crafted hypothesis. Those precious few will be ignored by the couch potatoes.

Thanks Obama

[jader3rd]

It's Obama's fault that the numbers are below expectations.

We're gonna create so many jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

we're gonna be sick of jobs. We're going to win so hard it's going to hurt, believe me.

Re:Thanks Obama

[Zuriel]

Thanks, Obama.

fake news

[helga the viking]

There is not shortage of skilled workers never has been. That's supply-side myth used to suppress the movement of value into profit not wages. Nowhere near full employment: http://bilbo.economicoutlook.n... http://bilbo.economicoutlook.n...

Re:ADP said 230,000

[GameboyRMH]

Well clearly the influence of the DEEP STATE is at work here, to report such un-American job numbers!

I wonder if Trump will request a secret investigation into how many deep state henchmen are in the labor department XD

Re:News for nerds huh?

[Archangel Michael]

I love this for a number of reasons, but mostly because it will piss off a huge number of useful idiots. Right up there with People Eating Tasty Animals will forever haunt animal rights activists.

That's so weird...

[kenh]

The DNC, an hour before the March job numbers were out put out this press release:

An hour before the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the March jobs numbers, the Democrat National Committee issued a news release saying, “Today, the U.S. economy is expected to continue the longest streak of private sector job growth on record, one of President Barack Obama’s most important accomplishments.

Source: CNS

From the same article:

The number of employed Americans increased 472,000 to 153,000,000 in March, setting a second straight monthly record; and the number of unemployed persons dropped by 326,000 to 7.2 million.

Oddly, the Slashdot article insists the results were less than impressive...

This Thread, Pre-Russian Troll

[notsteve]

It's so interesting to see these threads in virgin form, before the Russian trolls assigned to Slashdot descend.

Re:Jobs

[Goose In Orbit]

Shortly followed by a spike in jobs at undertakers I presume

US Private Sector Job Growth Far Exceeds Estimates

[walterbyrd]

Guess it depends on who you read:

> 4/5/2017 9:03 AM ET
> US Private Sector Job Growth Far Exceeds Estimates In March
> Employment in the U.S. private sector increased by much more than anticipated in the month of March, according to a report released by payroll processor ADP on Wednesday.
> ADP said private sector employment soared by 263,000 jobs in March compared to economist estimates for an increase of about 187,000 jobs.

http://www.rttnews.com/2760791/u-s-private-sector-job-growth-far-exceeds-estimates-in-march.aspx

Some data to understand that number

[whitroth]

About 8 or 10 years ago, and this was the *only* time I heard it, not since, the US economy needs to add about 128k jobs per month, for the number of people entering the workforce over those leaving it.

Re:Some data to understand that number

[bill_mcgonigle]

128k

Newer estimates are higher:

On average, 205,300 jobs need to be created every month just to keep up with population growth and not allow the unemployment situation to get worse.

So when you read "added 98,000" you have to understand "lost 108,000" relative to steady state.

And when the loyal press diligently repeats "and the unemployment rate fell" you can fall back on your fourth-grade mathematics to know that they're lying with statistics (like removing people who cannot find work).

Why this is important: since the Dot-Bomb the job market had not has a sustained period of permanent job growth. Throughout the "recovery" job rates have constantly declined. There is *no* evidence that the job market will *ever* recover.

Austrian economists understand that this is because of the time value of money and that artificially-suppressed interest rates prevent lending and by extension economic growth. But the Fed has both the responsibility to service the interest on the National Debt and setting the interest rates, and if rates rise to a more natural 8% or so, the US will default on debt payments. So they can either have the economy crash or crash the economy. That is their pickle and they have chosen to spread the misery rather than risk their seat of power. Unfortunately even for then, the current trajectory is unsustainable over a long term and this will eventually result in a currency crash, revolution, or tyranny (choose two). Keynesians believe that starting wars are the best way out of a bad economic situation and even though the Middle East wars haven't fixed the economy they're looking to knock over Syria and North Korea (damn the EMP's, or do those break wiindows?)

Fortunately we have the Feds' imposition of Common Core Math (Pearson style) so 4th-grade math won't be much of an impediment for long.

Re:Thanks Obama

[sunking2]

This actually makes sense. So many jobs have been saved that not as many people need to find new ones.

Restaurant bubble

[jfisherwa]

This might be partially related to the restaurant bubble ending.

Re:Suddenly.. Slashdot reports

[sexconker]

Why is this modded troll?

The headline is "Employers Added Just 98,000 Jobs in March Below Expectations of 180,000".
The summary starts with "Employers slowed their pace of hiring while the unemployment rate fell to the lowest level in almost a decade in March".
The rest of the summary also explains that March's growth numbers were likely impacted by January and February having had larger-than-expected numbers, the big storms in the midwest, etc.

The headline is very negative while the summary is fairly neutral. The headline could have also been spun to be positive, such as "98,000 Jobs Added As Unemployment Hits Decade Low", but of course that doesn't generate as many clicks.

The parent AC is correct. This shit doesn't belong on Slashdot and the headline is engineered to be negative.

Re:Thanks Obama

[sexconker]

We went through 8 years of Obama where anything bad was blamed on Bush and his policies, yet anything good was credited to Obama, often in advance and for no actual reason (e.g., the Nobel Peace Prize).

Yet even before Trump took office, he was taking blame for shit Obama did or put into motion. Many of the things he was blamed for were simply made up. And when he does something good, no one gives him credit.

The media dug their own graves during the 2-year long campaign cycle (thanks to, Hillary campaigning a fucking year early), and now their spinning in them since that's what they do best.

Re:Thanks Obama

[jader3rd]

This actually makes sense. So many jobs have been saved that not as many people need to find new ones.

Umm, you could have lots of people looking for a job, with no new jobs being added. One of the factors as to why the expectations are what they were, is due to unemployed people entering the job market. So now those people have entered the job market, only to find that less jobs were created.

Re:Fake news. ADP says 268,000

[Copid]

The ADP and BLS numbers aren't exactly the same metrics and don't use exactly the same methodology. They're pretty well correlated over the longer run, but they often diverge for short periods, especially when there's a sharp change in payroll or when government payroll changes don't closely track private sector ones.

The good news is that in any given month, it allows yutzes on slashdot to choose the one they like better and shout that the other one is clearly propaganda.

Re:Thanks Obama

[barakn]

Yet even before Trump took office, he was ... shit .... And when he does something good, no one gives him credit

He hasn't done anything well. You're just delusional.

ADP Begs to differ

[sycodon]

Private payrolls grew 263K in March vs. 185K est.: ADP

Can the labor dept and ADP possibly be talking about the same thing?

Re:ADP Begs to differ

[reboot246]

No, they are never talking about the same thing. You can look at it through their eyes if you want the President to look bad, or through the right stats if you want to make him look good. The only stat that means anything is how many people are working.

Re:Thanks Obama

[OrangeTide]

That was wrong too. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Re:ADP said 230,000

[naubol]

My roads are paved. I don't have to bribe policemen. It's shocking that there's a city with lead in the water. I can drive from one end of this massive country to the other on awesome highways and be free of highwaymen. I'm sending this message to you on a government invention.

Trust is not binary. Corporations are not perfect entities. Learn you some nuance, please.