The White House is trying to prepare Americans for a 'strange' jobs report [View all]
Yahoo Finance
The White House is trying to prepare Americans for a 'strange' jobs report
Ben Werschkul · Senior Producer and Writer
Tue, February 1, 2022, 4:27 PM
Ahead of Friday's jobs report, the White House is lowering expectations about a number they say could be hard hit by both the Omicron variant and a quirk of how the data is gathered each month. ... "We just wanted to prepare people to understand...what it is an assessment of and as a result, the months jobs report may show job losses in large part because workers were out sick from Omicron," Press Secretary Jen Psaki
said Monday.
Experts have warned of less than stellar news for weeks. On Jan. 20, Moodys Analytics' Adam Kamins joined Yahoo Finance and
noted that some strong 2021 jobs numbers "don't reflect Omicron yet. The variant could be a setback for jobs in January and February, he added.
The White House is concerned that Fridays report could be especially eye-popping because of how the jobs data is gathered. The January number being released on Friday is actually the result of a survey taken for a week around Jan. 12 instead of an accounting of the entire month. ... The reported COVID cases fueled by the Omicron variant
peaked nationally right around then.
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To make things even more complicated for the White House, if workers are out sick and don't receive a paycheck for the week in question, they're counted as having lost their job even if they returned the following week. ... The
Census Bureaus Household Pulse Survey has already found 9 million people who reported being out of work in that timeframe either because they had COVID-19 or were caring for somebody who did. That compares to around 3 million people just two weeks prior.
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