The following article by Annie McGrew, Galen Hendricks and Kate Bahn was posted on the Center for American Progress website February 1, 2018:
This Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will release employment data for January. This will be the last jobs day with Janet Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve Board, as her term expires on February 3. The Federal Open Market Committee met just days before the job release and decided not to raise interest rates. This is good news for America’s most disadvantaged workers who benefit from a tight labor market. Hopefully, Jay Powell, the new Federal Reserve Board chair, will continue to keep rates low, as the country is already seeing the benefits of a tight labor market: Black unemployment hit a historic low last month—a record for which President Donald Trump dishonestly tried to take credit. Economists, however, have argued that Trump simply inherited a trend that was largely the result of beneficial Obama-era economic policies and low interest rates. This is an important reminder that economists and policymakers should be evaluating the health of the labor market based on how the most disadvantaged members of the population are doing— not solely on the overall numbers—when the BLS releases its monthly employment numbers. While black unemployment has hit a historic low, it is still almost twice the rate of white unemployment, and the unemployment rate for prime-age single black men is a staggering 10 percent, as shown in Figure 2. Continue reading “The State of the U.S. Labor Market: Pre-January 2018 Jobs Release”