Washington State Adds to Unemployed Rolls, Retroactively

Regular readers of The SunBreak know that I have been conducting a quixotic campaign against the terrible reporting on unemployment statistics–in short, the problem is that media reports monthly statistical noise as “movement,” without including the margin of error from what is a polling process.

Quixotic? Oh, yes. February numbers are out, and here’s how a .001 blip is characterized: “Washington unemployment rate drops to 9.1 percent (Seattlepi.com),” “Washington state unemployment rate falls in February” (Puget Sound Business Journal), “Washington unemployment rate falls to 9.1 percent” (The Olympian).

Why is that crazy? Well, for one, Seattlepi.com reported that unemployment “dropped” to 9.1 percent in January, too.

Virtually every month for a year and a quarter, the media has told you that the unemployment rate in Washington has fallen, without the rate budging at all. (There’s a preliminary and revised rate of unemployment–when the rate has been said to “fall,” it’s usually a reference to the preliminary number. Then the revised rate returns the number to around where it fell from, so that next month’s preliminary number can “fall” again.)

But has the rate really fallen after all? It depends on which direction you look.

“State’s jobless picture in 2010 was worse than thought” is the Seattle Times headline:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which revises its data annually, now says Washington’s jobless rate hit 10 percent in December 2009 and stayed there for the first two months of 2010, topping the U.S. unemployment rate.

Wonderfully, the story goes on to tell you that today’s numbers, based on the same methodology that generated the numbers that needed to be significantly revised, are showing real improvement. (I shouldn’t carp; without the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we’d all be shorter on reasons to use the word “Orwellian.”)

Buried at the bottom of the story is this wisdom that the Times‘ headline writers generally ignore: “Desiree Phair, regional economist for King County, said it’s hard to draw conclusions from month-to-month fluctuations in the jobs numbers.”

Anyway, the state’s jobless picture is still worse than you think: “The unemployment rate, which is based on a household survey, fell in February because more people left the labor force, Wallace said.” Left the labor force.

In a story on January’s unemployment numbers, I chose instead to focus on an actual and alarming change of several percentage points: “Washington’s fullest measure of underemployment and unemployment (the U6 category) shows us leading the national average: the U.S. is 16.7 percent, and Washington is at 18.4 percent.”

The size of the underemployment bulge is a national trend that caught zerohedge’s Tyler Durden’s eye:

And the one indicator that nobody in the mainstream media will touch with a ten foot pole: “Underemployment, a measure that combines part-time workers wanting full-time work with those who are unemployed, surged in February to 19.9 percent.

There you have it. The SunBreak is not mainstream.