July Jobs Day

Earlier this morning, my colleague Matt Yglesias commented on the fact that the hospital sector has been cutting jobs more often recently. In the July jobs report, hospitals lost just over 7,000 workers. That’s a new, downward trend in an industry that has generally only grown over the last decade.

Today, Advisory Board Daily Briefing editor Dan Diamond tweeted a chart emphasizing just how strong the health care industry has been throughout the downturn and recovery:

Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Plosser dissented from this week’s FOMC statement, arguing that the country needs tighter money faster than Janet Yellen is offering. Then this morning he doubled down in a statement, arguing that the Fed’s current stance is “well behind” where it should be in light of the falling unemployment rate.

It was bold of Plosser to make that statement at 8 AM knowing full well that through a quirk of the calendar, new unemployment data and new inflation data were both coming out at 8:30 AM this morning. And thanks to that quirk, we were able to find out that Plosser was wrong in record time.

Every month, the jobs report shows the staggering difference in job market prospects between college grads and less-educated Americans. July was no different. The Unemployment rate for people with bachelor’s degrees was 3.1 percent, roughly half that for people with high school diplomas alone.

And it’s not that the lower rate is because all those college grads dropped out of the labor force; as you go up the ladder, the labor force participation rate (the share of people working or looking for a job) also climbs. For people with less than a high school education, it’s 44.4 percent. For four-year grads, it’s 74.7 percent.

This is in some ways more of a health policy indicator than a labor market one, but according to today’s jobs report employment in America’s hospitals fell by 7,000.

Historically, months in which the hospital sector sheds jobs have been very rare. But it’s been happening more recently. Hospital employment reached a peak of 4,799,000 back in April 2013. Then it declined fitfully and rose again up to 4,802,900 last month. The 7,000 worker decline, however, means that we’re back below that April level from over a year ago.

The Labor Department reported Friday that employers added 209,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, slightly under consensus estimates of 230,000. The jobless rate ticked up slightly, from 6.1 to 6.2 percent. That had been expected to hold steady, at 6.1 percent.

Though the headline payrolls figure disappointed slightly, several recent months of solid monthly growth in that measure seem to suggest job growth is trending higher.

It’s not as fun as the new headline numbers, but the revised data from previous months is the more informative and accurate portion of jobs day and the news there was moderately good — both June and May were revised upward, adding a total of 15,000 extra jobs.

Tomorrow is Jobs Day. The consensus of economic forecasters is that the economy will gain 233,000 jobs while the unemployment rate stays put at 6.1 percent.

In the context of a fifth consecutive month of payroll growth over 200,000 a steady unemployment rate would actually be better news than a falling one since a steady rate would indicate that the labor force is expanding in response to benign economic conditions and the economy is not running out of room to grow.

One more sign that life is improving for American workers: paychecks are finally growing faster.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that workers’ wages and salaries grew by a seasonally adjusted 0.6 percent during the second quarter, the fastest pace since the third quarter of 2008.