Economy

They are apparently describing the payroll jobs survey, the one that bellows out each month "ANOTHER 250,000 jobs added in January" or whatever. (OK, the headline never says ANOTHER, it's only when people file for unemployment benefits that they use "another", as in "ANOTHER 280,000 filed for jobless benefits last week" (dig dig :rofl

In the article, there is a tweet by Jared Bernstein:

There is another survey, called the HOUSEHOLD SURVEY that produces the unemployment rate, Labor Force Participation Rate, number of Employed (which is usually ignored by media and analysts due to small sample size and a lot of noise). The article doesn't describe how that will be affected. It is my understanding that -- similarly to the payroll survey -- it is usually conducted over a week that includes the 12th of the month, so that will be the week that includes Wednesday Jan 12, about when the Omicron new case rate peaked nationally.

Anyhoo, I'm speculating what this will do to the unemployment rate, which is the other big number the media highlights in their headlines (BLS too).

If they are not employed according to this questionnaire / Household Survey criteria, that doesn't mean they are automatically unemployed. Rather, to be counted as unemployed, one must also have looked for work in the past 4 weeks. Presumably, someone out sick would not be looking for other work, so a large number of these folks wouldn't jack up the unemployment rate.

So we might have a jobs report that says 200,000 or 400,000 jobs LOST and yet a very small rise or even reduction in the unemployment rate