A reader asserts that Senator Johnson, stating “It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin.” means that I should state the number of jobs, not the number of people employed. However, in the previous PublishI showed exactly the manufacturing and non-agricultural salaried employment works (taken from the Current Establishment Survey), which refer to the number of jobs, namely:
Now the reader may believe that the BLS is misplaced to describe their own data series, but I have a little more confidence. So actually, in terms of jobs, it’s worth tracing the CES series. (If you want the current description, see the BLS page on survey differences, here).
Reader Econned then claims without any supporting evidence that I can find:
You are showing filled jobs while Johnson also refers to unfilled jobs.
In fact, Johnson just say “It’s not like we don’t have enough jobs here in Wisconsin.” He does not say “It’s not like we don’t have enough empty jobs here in Wisconsin. But even taking that assertion at face value, total jobs plus openings had not recovered to the pre-recession peak of 3,157,000 in total when Senator Johnson made his remark. It was quite well below the level corresponding to the pre-recession trend.
Figure 3: Wisconsin Private Non-Farm Payroll Employment plus JOLTS job openings (blue), sa, on a logarithmic scale defined by the NBER, peak to trough recession dates are shaded gray. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, NBER and author’s calculations.
Total CES jobs and openings were 130,000 below the 2009M06-2020M01 trend in February 2022, when Senator Johnson made his remark (trend estimated using time trend regression).
Addendum:
Reader Claims accepted I should be ashamed to use jobs instead of unfilled jobs. Well, here’s the total number of jobs and unfilled jobs, and a picture of how it was below pre-recession levels in 2022M02, and well below trend, when Senator Johnson refers to *jobs*.
Figure 4: Wisconsin private non-farm payroll employment plus JOLTS job vacancies (blue), sa, and estimated trend over 2009M06-2020M01 (red), both on a logarithmic scale. The NBER has defined peak-to-trough recession dates as shaded. Source: BLS via FRED, BLS, NBER and author’s calculations.