Latest / Bloomberg Intelligence / DOL's Shierholz: Increase in Hours Offsets Job Growth (Audio)

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DOL's Shierholz: Increase in Hours Offsets Job Growth (Audio) · Bloomberg Intelligence

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  Speaker 1: Broadcasting live to New York, Bloomberg eleventh Rio to Washington,
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  Speaker 1: Taking Stock to government data showing that employers added just
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  Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty thousand jobs in April, the unemployment
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  Speaker 1: or rate holding steady at five percent. We're gonna be
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  Speaker 1: speaking with Heidi Shierholtz, Labor Secretary. Tom Perez is Chief
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  Speaker 1: Economists find out what's going on with hiring. But right
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  Speaker 1: market is staging a comeback. Resource producers are rallying, along
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  Speaker 1: still declining. A slowdown in jobs growth, coupled with accelerating
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  Speaker 1: advisor at Alliance and a Bloomberg View columnist had this
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  Speaker 1: reaction to the jobs report. If you look at the
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  Speaker 1: internals of this employment report is actually quite mixed. So
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  Speaker 1: to conclude that quickly that June is completely out of
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  Speaker 1: the question and that we're unlucky to get a hike
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  Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen, I think it's going to fall. We
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  Speaker 1: check Americas every fifteen minutes throughout the trading Daydale Industrial
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  Speaker 1: average is up sixty nine points. I gained a four
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  Speaker 1: two thirds of a percent at forty four sixty one.
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  Speaker 1: Year Treasury down nine thirty seconds with the yield of
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  Speaker 1: one point seven seven percent. Among today's stop business stories,
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  Speaker 1: Amazon dot Com plans to eliminate gaps in its free
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  Speaker 1: every zip code of the twenty seven cities where the
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  Speaker 1: latest investor to reveal that it was burned by Valiant Pharmaceuticals.
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  Speaker 1: The once high flying pharmaceutical company is under scrutiny for
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  Speaker 1: its billing practices. It's two thirty two on Wall Street,
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  Speaker 1: and that means it's time to get enough data. Some
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  Speaker 1: Thank you Catherine from the Bloomberg Newsroom. I'm a Lisa Parenti.
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  Speaker 1: Alisa Parenti, Catherine, thank you, and now let's get a
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  Speaker 1: quick update of those equity bandmarks down. Industrial leverages up
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  Speaker 1: sixty nine points at seventeen thousand, seven hundred twenty nine.
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  Speaker 1: SMP five, founded he raced earlier, loss is currently up
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  Speaker 1: business flash. He's taking stock with Kathleen Hayes and Grim
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  Speaker 1: Box on Bloomberg Radio. Employers in the United States scaling
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  Speaker 1: back there April, hiring amid some eaker economic growth, but
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  Speaker 1: the wages increased the last month and the work we
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  Speaker 1: grew longer. Let's find out what's going on with the
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  Speaker 1: U S economy. We have Heidi Shecherholtz, the chief economist
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  Speaker 1: for Labor Secretary Tom Perez. Heidi, thanks very much for
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  Speaker 1: being here, very much for having me. All right, So, Heidi,
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  Speaker 1: it can you as step back as an economist. You're
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  Speaker 1: not responsible for the data. You just interpreted looking at
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  Speaker 1: the details. What does it tell you? So we are
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  Speaker 1: jobs streak continued in April. We added a hundred and
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  Speaker 1: sixty thousand jobs, potentually lower than the pace of growth
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  Speaker 1: that we had been seeing, but it's well above the
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  Speaker 1: pace that we need to keep the unemployment rate low
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  Speaker 1: and stable. So just to sort of put a number
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  Speaker 1: on that, estimates from a wide variety of sources are
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  Speaker 1: that right now we need around eighty thousand jobs just
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  Speaker 1: to sort of hold steady. So we got double that.
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  Speaker 1: So it's not the two hundred thousand plus that we
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  Speaker 1: have been seeing, but it's a very solid number. The
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  Speaker 1: other thing that I think is um useful to just
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  Speaker 1: keep in mind is that there's always a lot of
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  Speaker 1: two months to month variability in these numbers. Last year,
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  Speaker 1: we average two hundred twenty nine thousand jobs on average
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  Speaker 1: per month, and we had three months in the year
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  Speaker 1: where we got job growth of a hundred and fifty
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  Speaker 1: thousand or less and so it's just this sort of
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  Speaker 1: common thing where you see this bouncing around. So we
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  Speaker 1: don't get too freaked out if it's a lower number,
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  Speaker 1: we don't get too giddy if it's a really high number. Um,
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  Speaker 1: this represents pretty solid job growth, alright. If it represents
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  Speaker 1: a solid job growth, where is the weakness in the
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  Speaker 1: job in the job sector. Yeah, you know. The thing
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  Speaker 1: that I think is just the ty ongoing saying that
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  Speaker 1: I'm got my eyes on with these numbers is age growth.
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  Speaker 1: And we are seeing some acceleration of wage growth over
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  Speaker 1: the last year. Wages grew two point five percent with
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  Speaker 1: low inflation. That means workers are seeing some real gains.
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  Speaker 1: But we just have a lot of ground make up.
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  Speaker 1: But the question, but hang on, the question was where
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  Speaker 1: was the weakness in the actual jobs report. I was
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  Speaker 1: on the impression that retailers cutting payrolls, and that also
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  Speaker 1: construction companies had been adding the fewest positions since the
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  Speaker 1: last June. Yes, you're totally right. I was interpreting jobs
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  Speaker 1: report broadly. I appreciate it. Go ahead, you are, You're
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  Speaker 1: absolutely right. So, yes, the retail numbers were low. Um,
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  Speaker 1: the construction numbers were low. Both of those things, particularly construction,
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  Speaker 1: UM could be have a big weather component, and it's
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  Speaker 1: not the weather component that we typically think of, where
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  Speaker 1: we got a huge snowstorm and that's why the numbers
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  Speaker 1: were low, which happens on occasion in winter months. This
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  Speaker 1: is a different story here. Or what we saw is
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  Speaker 1: extremely mild weather in the in February and March, and
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  Speaker 1: so some of the hiring that would have otherwise happened
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  Speaker 1: in April in for example, construction instead got pulled forward
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  Speaker 1: and so employers hired those people early. So we saw
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  Speaker 1: big gains in construction in February and March, and this
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  Speaker 1: and the April numbers and construction looked quite weak by comparison.
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  Speaker 1: But I think that, UM, I believe due to the
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  Speaker 1: weather effects of very mild February March that we had.
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  Speaker 1: I'm not too concerned that we're seeing a an ongoing
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  Speaker 1: slowdown in construction, but that's definitely something I'll be keeping
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  Speaker 1: my eyes on. Okay, So now move on to the
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  Speaker 1: wage growth, but also the workweek. It grew longer for workers. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: it increased, that's very good news. I um it had
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  Speaker 1: picked down earlier, so it's not it's it's still within
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  Speaker 1: a band that we've been being for quite some time now.
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  Speaker 1: The work week basically it's kind of moving sideways at
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  Speaker 1: this point, fluctuating up and down a little bit. But
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  Speaker 1: one of the things that the increasing workweek just is
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  Speaker 1: um sort of provide some comfort. When when you get
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  Speaker 1: a jobs number that's one sixty when everyone expected two hundred,
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  Speaker 1: one of the things you do is look for signs
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  Speaker 1: of do I think this is a one off, or
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  Speaker 1: do I think there's signs that this may be signaling
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  Speaker 1: some sort of like ongoing softening. And the fact that
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  Speaker 1: the work week increased is a very good sign that
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  Speaker 1: that that we didn't see the strong the two plus
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  Speaker 1: job grows, but the increase in hours means that we're
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  Speaker 1: um sort of offset some of the the decline and
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  Speaker 1: job job grows in a way that make it that
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  Speaker 1: comforts economists, which is that can be a leading indicator
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  Speaker 1: if we are going to be seeing ongoing dramatic, we
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  Speaker 1: reduced job growth, I would expect to see ours drop
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  Speaker 1: rather than increase. And the jobless rate remaining at five
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  Speaker 1: per cent is that likely to indicate full employment or
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  Speaker 1: near full employment. So I think that the other signs
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  Speaker 1: in the labor markets suggest that we aren't there yet,
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  Speaker 1: that there's still a ways to go. We have made
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  Speaker 1: enormous progress. The worst of it, the unemployment was ten
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  Speaker 1: we're now we've now cut that in half, so that
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  Speaker 1: we've we've made tremendous progress. But I don't think we're
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  Speaker 1: done yet. And so just to put it in context,
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  Speaker 1: before the recession, for the two years before the Great
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  Speaker 1: Recession hit, the unemployment rate average four point six percent
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  Speaker 1: and today at five. Thank you very much, Heidi Shareholds,
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  Speaker 1: the economist, Chief economist for the Department of Labor Secretary
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  Speaker 1: Tom Perez. You're listening to taking Stock on Boomberg Radio.
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