Besides, if you look at the avg hours worked a week it's down 0.1 on the month (instead of cutting workers, co's are just telling them to stay at home). 0.1 decline in weekly hours translates to arnd 350k jobs, so this is not rosy. Finally, I also like to look at the number of people in temp jobs BLS series and that is still going down, signaling that improvements in the labor mkt haven't begun yet. So I, for one, am not buying this as a hugely bullish sign...
the number to watch is U6 unemployment it is now at 16.4% http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm
You can interpret these numbers a 1000 different ways, I dont care if it was -1 job or -500,000, there weren't any jobs created for the month of May, Period. My only take is that if things do start looking great again, you know -300,000 to some is great news, don't you think its time to crank up the interest rates to keep everything from getting just a little ahead of itself.
retirees who now have to unretire because their house and their 401Ks are way down. So much for those financial advisors, who can tell you what age to retire, based on a nice 8-9% stock market rise for the next 500 years...
Well the numbers to look for yesterday were all saying look for.... 500k lost and 9.2 unemployment. Now they say the numbers beat and 9.4. Um....
I agree that some of these statistics should be included in a "real unemployment" figure, with the exception of people out of work who are not actively looking for a job but would like one nonetheless. I wouldn't consider these people unemployed, I'd consider them lazy. Do they expect an employer to call them up with a job offer?