Growth

Productivity

Median household income

Jobs

Unemployment

Earnings

ECI

BLS Employment Situation

For the most recent Employment Situation Summary, go to https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

Most of what follows is taken from https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm

BLS data come from two monthly surveys: the Current Population Survey (CPS; household survey) and the Current Employment Statistics survey (CES; establishment survey).

Household Survey

Provides information on the labor force, employment, and unemployment.

It is a sample survey of about 60,000 eligible households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The sample is selected to reflect the entire civilian noninstitutional population.

Based on responses to a series of questions on work and job search activities, each person 16 years and over in a sample household is classified as employed, unemployed, or not in the labor force.

• People are classified as employed if they did any work at all as paid employees during the reference week; worked in their own business, profession, or on their own farm; or worked without pay at least 15 hours in a family business or farm. People are also counted as employed if they were temporarily absent from their jobs because of illness, bad weather, vacation, labor-management disputes, or personal reasons.

• People are classified as unemployed if they meet all of the following criteria: they had no employment during the reference week; they were available for work at that time; and they made specific active efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. People laid off from a job and expecting recall need not be looking for work to be counted as unemployed.

• Among those not in the labor force are those marginally attached to the labor force. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Discouraged workers are a subset of the marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them.

Definitions

• The civilian labor force is the sum of the employed and unemployed. Those people not classified as employed or unemployed are not in the labor force.

• The unemployment rate is the number unemployed as a percent of the labor force.

• The labor force participation rate is the labor force as a percent of the population.

• The employment-population ratio is the employed as a percent of the population.

Establishment Survey

Provides information on employment, hours, and earnings of employees on nonfarm payrolls.

BLS collects these data each month from the payroll records of a sample of nonagricultural business establishments.

Each month the CES program surveys about 121,000 businesses and government agencies. The active sample includes approximately one-third of all nonfarm payroll jobs.

Important Distinctions

The two surveys typically give rise to different estimates for employment. Why?

• The household survey includes agricultural workers, self-employed workers whose businesses are unincorporated, unpaid family workers, and private household workers among the employed. These groups are excluded from the establishment survey.

• The household survey includes people on unpaid leave among the employed. The establishment survey does not.

• The household survey is limited to workers 16 years of age and older. The establishment survey is not limited by age.

• The household survey has no duplication of individuals, because individuals are counted only once, even if they hold more than one job. In the establishment survey, employees working at more than one job and thus appearing on more than one payroll are counted separately for each appearance.

Price indexes

Expected inflation

Oil price

BLS CPI Summary

For the latest Consumer Price Index summary, go to: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

Most of what follows is taken from the Technical Note in the Summary.

Brief Explanation of the CPI

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures the change in prices paid by consumers for goods and services. The CPI reflects spending patterns for each of two population groups: all urban consumers and urban wage earners and clerical workers.

The all urban consumer group represents over 90 percent of the total U.S. population. It is based on the expenditures of almost all residents of urban or metropolitan areas, including professionals, the self-employed, the poor, the unemployed, and retired people, as well as urban wage earners and clerical workers.

Not included in the CPI are the spending patterns of:

• people living in rural nonmetropolitan areas,

• farming families,

• people in the Armed Forces, and

• those in institutions, such as prisons and mental hospitals.

The CPIs are based on prices of food, clothing, shelter, fuels, transportation, doctors’ and dentists’ services, drugs, and other goods and services that people buy for day-to-day living.

Prices are collected each month in 75 urban areas across the country from about 6,000 housing units and approximately 22,000 retail establishments (department stores, supermarkets, hospitals, filling stations, and other types of stores and service establishments). All taxes directly associated with the purchase and use of items are included in the index.

Prices of most goods and services are obtained by personal visit, telephone call, web, or app collection by the Bureau’s trained representatives.

The index measures price change from a designed reference date. For most of the CPI-U and the CPI-W, the reference base is 1982-84 equals 100.

An increase of 7 percent from the reference base, for example, is shown as 107.000. Alternatively, that relationship can also be expressed as the price of a base period market basket of goods and services rising from $100 to $107.

How to Use Seasonally Adjusted and Unadjusted Data

For analyzing short-term price trends in the economy, seasonally adjusted changes are usually preferred since they eliminate the effect of changes that normally occur at the same time and in about the same magnitude every year-such as price movements resulting from weather events, production cycles, model changeovers, holidays, and sales. This allows data users to focus on changes that are not typical for the time of year.

The unadjusted data are of primary interest to consumers concerned about the prices they actually pay. Unadjusted data are also used extensively for escalation purposes. Many collective bargaining contract agreements and pension plans, for example, tie compensation changes to the Consumer Price Index before adjustment for seasonal variation. BLS advises against the use of seasonally adjusted data in escalation agreements because seasonally adjusted series are revised annually for five years.