Employment Update: July 2014

Since the last Employment Update that I published, for April 2014, three others have been issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the last one, for July, here. I’ve been diverted from blogging by various changes in our lives, most notable buying and selling houses and, for us, a big move.

In that period, wouldn’t you know it, in May 2014, to be exact, the U.S. Economy finally erased the job losses produced by the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009. That job loss was 8.663 million jobs, measured as follows:

In December 2007, total employment stood at 138.35 million. In December 2009, it had dropped to 129.687 million. The difference between these dates is the loss. In May 2014, employment finally reached 138.497 million, therefore just barely exceeding the previous high at the end of 2007. By July of this year, that last Employment Report from the BLS, total employment was 139.004 million, therefore still growing in the right direction.

An updated chart, showing the economy’s performance since December 2007, follows. Following it is a chart showing total losses and gains, actual for 2007-2013 and an annualized projections for 2014.

Now that we have recovered the jobs lost in the Great Recession, another process is beginning. It is the creation of new jobs necessary to meet the needs of population increase—to accommodate the growth of the labor force. As I have shown before (here), in the 2010-2020 period, we need to add 87,300 jobs every month just to keep up with the population. If we take the period 2008-2013, plus the first four months in 2014 (when we were still just replacing lost jobs), we were building a deficit. The period described is 76 months. The deficit, therefore was 6.635 million jobs as April 2014 ended.

Since April, we have had job gains in excess of 87,300 every month. In May, with job gains of 229,000, 141,700 jobs (229-87.3) could be counted against call it the accumulated Growth Deficit of 6.6 million jobs. The economy is now in sunnier climes. Therefore in just the May to July period we’ve already managed to recover 7.1 percent of that deficit—rather than adding yet another 87,300 jobs to it—as in the last 76 months. A graphic shows this change.

Good news, by and large.