Poll: Unemployment Is Gallup-ing Upward
Team Obama had better hope that the people at Gallup are somehow screwing up bigtime (HT Breitbart) — because if they’re not, the unemployment rate is on its way up (data is through yesterday; Gallup’s link is apparently continuously updated):
Since the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics bases its monthly report on the weekly pay period containing the 12th, there’s always a lag of 2-3 weeks between what they report and what’s really happening on the ground.
If the roughly 0.5-point distance between BLS and Gallup seen during the week containing July 12 stays the same, we can expect the BLS’s September 6 Employment Situation report to tell us that the unemployment rate shot up to about 7.9% (a half-point below Gallup’s average during the week containing August 12 of 8.4%). And if Gallup is correctly detecting a deeply negative trend, it will be going up even more after that.
As I noted above, the Obama administration had better hope that Gallup, which claims to know “more about the attitudes and behaviors of the world’s constituents, employees, and customers than any other organization,” is somehow screwing up. I doubt they are.
How did the summer hiring season stack up to past years? Now that summer is drawing to a close, lots of temp part time jobs will be disappearing come September until the next uptick in November for the Christmas Season. Now some of this downward trend will be offset by the continuing conversion of full time to part time jobs. If we use the 30 hr cap as a measuring stick, each formerly 40 hour full time job is worth 1.25 part time jobs on an hour for hour basis.
What would be a rational guide for a business to decide how many full time employees to keep versus the balance in part time staff? Would it be fair to say managers will keep their full time status for the sake of management continuity and slash most if not all the non managerial staff to part timers? What’s the manager to staff ratio of a typical company? With this info we could estimate the full impact of ObamaCare by 2015 on large and medium sized businesses of greater than 50 employees.
Given the loophole of self insurance, I would suspect that all large and medium sized businesses will terminate their existing health insurance plans by the end of the fiscal year or their anniversary date to start up a self funded plan to buy a few years of time before dumping everyone on the exchange. That will pretty much put an end to the traditional health insurance company run plans leaving them to run business plans exclusively.
Comment by dscott — August 23, 2013 @ 4:33 pm
ADP’s July 2013 employment report (historical payroll data spreadsheet) has the following useful information. They estimate the workforce of those working in small companies of less than 50 employees to be approx. 47,541,000
40,620,000 in 50 to 499 Mid size company
25,653,000 in 500+ Large company
66,273,000 total employed
Let’s guessimate for the sake of argument that the ratio of manager to staff is 10% of the workforce in these 50 and over sized companies. Assume no change in the under 50 sized company.
That works out to 4,062,000 managers in the mid size and
2,565,300 in the large companies.
66,273,000 total
-2,565,300 managers large
-4,062,000 managers mid
—————–
59,645,700 at risk non managerial jobs subject to hourly down sizing to be impacted by ObamaCare.
Converting these all to part time positions (via the 1.25 factor) in the absolute worst case would employ 74,557,125 people, an increase in total employment by 14,911,425…if everything goes according to plan, I mean unintended consequence… hmmmm That would sop up everyone currently counted as unemployed and all those who are NOT IN LABOR FORCE, wanting a job.
Feature or bug??? of the bottom up economy as promised by Barack Obama in his 2008 campaign to redistribute the wealth when talking to Joe the Plumber.
Taking this literally as a possible outcome, every one of these part timers would be eligible for food stamps and therefore become a dependent upon the government. Yeah, I’m saying this is a planned feature of ObamaCare with well over 50% of the workforce beholding to government to make ends meet as a part timer.
Comment by dscott — August 23, 2013 @ 5:12 pm
Interesting points indeed. “Fundamental transformation.”
Comment by Tom — August 23, 2013 @ 8:30 pm
[...] to July, before June itself was revised down by about 8%; a 7.3% drop in durable goods orders; and a troubling upward spike in Gallup’s daily unemployment tracking poll, giving rise to legitimate worries about where [...]
Pingback by BizzyBlog — August 28, 2013 @ 8:46 pm