The July Oregon employment numbers are out today and the news is...okay. Oregon added 1,800 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis and the unemployment rate rose to 8.7% from 8.5%.
Aha! My sarcasm sense-o-meter is sounding! But I choose to ignore it.
In fact, one of the interesting tidbits is that government employment actually grew in July in Oregon, which is weird. I suspect this mont's report is going to be an aberration in the trend.
I thought the numbers showed that government employment didn't drop by as much as the seasonal adjustment, but it still dropped.
"Despite the slight gain in July, federal government was down 1,100 from July 2011. Similarly, local government was down 2,100 since July 2011, while state government was flat over the year."
So we expected to lose 31,700 gov't jobs from June to July, but we only lost 30,000. So I know why we do seasonal adjustments, but it is hard to look at those numbers and really feel like government employment grew in July.
Is that 31,700 drop related to the end of the school year? That is a big number, and it is hard to think of what other gov't sector would have that kind of seasonal impact between June and July.
3 comments:
What's the solution? More govt. workers?
Aha! My sarcasm sense-o-meter is sounding! But I choose to ignore it.
In fact, one of the interesting tidbits is that government employment actually grew in July in Oregon, which is weird. I suspect this mont's report is going to be an aberration in the trend.
I thought the numbers showed that government employment didn't drop by as much as the seasonal adjustment, but it still dropped.
"Despite the slight gain in July, federal government was down 1,100 from July 2011. Similarly, local government was down 2,100 since July 2011, while state government was flat over the year."
So we expected to lose 31,700 gov't jobs from June to July, but we only lost 30,000. So I know why we do seasonal adjustments, but it is hard to look at those numbers and really feel like government employment grew in July.
Is that 31,700 drop related to the end of the school year? That is a big number, and it is hard to think of what other gov't sector would have that kind of seasonal impact between June and July.
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