Payroll employment up by 2 million in 2005, MLR: The Editor's Desk

Here's the some more news and one more chart about U.S. employment from the BLS from about 10 days ago. The Editor's Desk at BLS puts out one new chart each weekday.

This entry and the accompanying chart show the seasonally adjusted annual change in non-farm employment for the past 7 years from 1999 to 2005. This is a longer time period than normally used in these published BLS Editor Desk reports. I would have liked this better if it had showed the year over year behavior every month over the same period (possibly with some moving average to smooth the data a bit). Since it showing a whole year's total results, I would also have preferred to see not seasonally adjusted data used.

In our previous posts this week, it's clear that there is a lot more to understanding employment than a single headline number chart -even one with a memorable total number like 2 million. Even though the headline number gets a lot of play, the chart even for a single metric surely adds some further perspective when it covers a period of this length.

The articles also discusses yearly gains in specific industries such as construction, finance, and mining but offers no charts for these.