U.S. Job Count Revised Up By 386K

If you suspect it’s getting harder every month to recruit the talent you need, the government says you could be right. The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised up by almost 400,000 its count of the total jobs in the nation.

The private sector created 452,000 more jobs than was reported in the monthly counts announced by the U.S. Department of Labor. Government payroll cuts reduced the total job gain to 386,000. The monthly report for September is scheduled to be released Oct. 5th.

Most of the industry sectors were revised up. On a percentage basis, the biggest increases were in information services (a category that includes telecommunications, publishing, and IT among others), construction, and mining and logging (largely due to the petroleum industry hiring). Manufacturing lost 25,000 jobs and the professional and business services sector (which includes temporary hiring) dropped 14,000 jobs.

Annually the Bureau of Labor Statistics revises its job counts, using state unemployment insurance (UI) tax records required of virtually all companies. The upward revision applies to the period April 2011 to March 2102, meaning that at the end of March the economy had 133.24 million total non-farm people working. The revision represents a .3 percent adjustment to the national count, which is consistent with the revisions over the last 10 years. Just a few years ago, the bureau revised down its job count by some 900,000 jobs.

“The recovery,” said Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, “was not as disappointing as we thought. It was on much firmer footing.”

In a different report, the Department of Labor said initial claims for jobless benefits dropped 26,000 to 359,000 for the week ending Sept. 22nd. It’s the lowest count since 357,000 claims were filed for the week ending July 21. It was also well below the median estimate of 375,000 new filings that economists in a Bloomberg survey had forecast.