Employment Numbers An April Snow Job

Donald Trump managed to shove his way into the spotlight again last week, claiming the US is heading for “a massive recession.” Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media scoffed at Trump’s assertion, pointing to the “great jobs report” that came out Friday.

The report did show the US economy added some 215,000 jobs, slightly more than expected. But once again, the headlines only tell a little piece of the story. And once again, most mainstream media and financial analysts are ignoring the bigger picture. In fact, all of the positive spin about a great employment outlook is nothing more than an April snow job. As Peter Schiff succinctly put it in his recent podcast, this was not a good jobs report:

We added the jobs we don’t want; we lost the jobs we do want. That is the real story. It’s the story nobody wants to tell. Everybody wants to talk about the number as if this is some kind of economic miracle.”

As was the case the month before, part-time jobs drove the increase. When you dig into the numbers, you find 127,000 of the new jobs went to people who already had at least one job. In other words, 60% of the new jobs were filled by people who were already employed. That means the vast majority were part-time. That doesn’t take into account people who had no job and took a part-time job as their first job. So well over 60% of the new jobs added in March were part-time jobs.

When you break it down, the full-time unemployment rate rose from 4.9 to 5.1% while the part-time rate dropped from 4.9 to 4.8%. Meanwhile, the 29,000 manufacturing jobs lost was the highest number since 2009.

Peter gave the perfect explanation for what’s going on with the job market in his podcast.

Those [jobs lost] are our best paying jobs. At the same time, the number of waiters and waitresses surged to an all-time record high. This is what’s going on. Let’s say you’re a waiter and your employer will not let you work full-time…because he can’t afford the benefits; he can’t afford the Obamacare…What do you do? You find another restaurant and you get another part-time job. That’s why we created 215,000 jobs.”