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I Give Josh Zumbrun Half Credit For His Point About JOLTS

I was haranguing a Wall Street Journal reporter the other day for the way he reported an economic data release. So, what else is new? In this case the data in question was the JOLTs report, and as usual, I had a different take than all of the mainstream media reports.

The WSJ’s Josh Zumbrun pointed out to me that Professional and Business (PB) Services are not low wage jobs. He’s partly right. In fact, the median in that sector is above the mid range for all jobs. However a few very highly paid professionals in that field skew the average. These include lawyers, engineers, architects, designers, accountants, management consultants, computer systems analysts, and corporate managers.

The BLS says that 83% of the workers in the PB field are production and nonsupervisory. The average weekly earnings for this group in December was $862. The average for all private employees was $848. It’s reasonable to infer that roughly half the jobs in the group are at or below the average, but they are not “low pay” to the extent that the other 3 private sector categories on the list of most job openings was.

Digging a little deeper, the Professional and Business (PB) Services Category is divided into several sub categories. The biggest ones are Professional and Technical (PT) services and Administrative/Waste (A&W) services. Each accounts for about 45% of the total. Corporate management accounts for the rest. 93% of the workers in A&W were production and nonsupervisory. The average weekly pay for that group was $569.60, up about 2.5% in a year. So 40% of all PB workers are, in fact, low wage.

The average weekly pay for production and non-supervisory workers in the PT group was $1167.84, up about 3.5%. The takeaway there is that about 45% of the jobs in the overall PB sector are paid well above the average wage.

Where are most of the jobs? There were 300,000 net hires in the PT category over the past year and an increase of 360,000 in A&W.

So I’ll give Josh Zumbrun half credit for the point he made. There were some good job openings in the JOLTS numbers, but my point that most were low pay jobs that nobody wants to take is still supported. There’s also a suggestion in the low rate of hires that business can’t find workers with the skills needed to fill the higher paying jobs.

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