The United States' job market is showing signs of stress.
A routine preliminary report released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised hiring figures down for 12 months ending in March. The report said the jobs numbers were 911,000 higher than they should have been. This came as the White House is seeking to undermine the BLS, accusing it of manipulating data.
That report followed an August jobs report that showed the first net loss of jobs since the pandemic.
This week, LPM’s Bill Burton spoke with Michael Gritton, the executive director of KentuckianaWorks, about Louisville's job market. This conversation was edited for clarity.
The August jobs report showed not just 22,000 jobs being added last month, but a slight uptick in the unemployment rate to 4.3% nationally. What about locally? What are we seeing here?
We're seeing the same kind of thing. Things are slowing. When we came out of COVID, the employment situation was fantastic here, as it was around the country. Many more job postings than people looking for those kinds of jobs. And so employers were hungry. You were watching UPS and GE Appliances running ads on TV, looking for people. That was 2021-2022. We seem to be a little bit more in an equilibrium situation now, where there are jobs being posted, there are people looking, but the number of jobs being created has clearly slowed, and that's what you're seeing both in Louisville and in the region around us.
Over the last few months, there have been some high profile manufacturing announcements in the state, including GE Appliances adding jobs at a future date here in Louisville. But do those announcements in any way have any impact on what's happening right now?
They do. I mean, GE Appliances is hiring right now, and they're also going to be hiring another 700 people when that new part of the plant gets open in early 2027.
The Ford Louisville Assembly Plant announcement is very instructive. It's fantastic for Louisville that Ford is making such a big investment at the plant my dad worked at for 30 years. But there are 3,500 or so people who work at that plant today, and the announcement seems to be that once they make that big investment, about 2,200 to 2,500 will be needed. So there is a lesson there. Even as we're adding manufacturing jobs, manufacturing employers are getting smarter every day about using robots and technology to need fewer humans to make things.
After the July national jobs report disappointed President Donald Trump, he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Does that firing and the President's comment that the July jobs report was “rigged” affect what's happened with the local offices?
I just heard an interview on national NPR and the people that are doing those statistics at the BLS are still legitimate people who are using legitimate statistics. So that's the good news. So the report that came out on Friday still has tons of credibility behind it. Over time, that may not be true. And if you weaken our ability to know what's happening or to trust the information that comes from our government, that isn't good for anybody. It's not good for Republicans. It's not good for Democrats. It's not good for people that run companies. It's just not the right thing to do.
What about the nuts and bolts of assembling those numbers? Are they done first at the local level and then sent nationally?
One of them is based on an employer survey. The other is based on a household survey. Both are based on surveys that are conducted, and I believe it's state offices who conduct them and then funnel the information to the national. The American system is very interesting, because even though we have a federal government, there are really 50 state governments, and oftentimes they work in partnership to do these kinds of things. So those surveys are still happening.
Part of what we need is: Think about the last time you responded to a survey on the phone or on the computer. A lot of us sort of avoid that kind of thing these days. The BLS is going to have to keep modifying the way it collects this information in order to have the most up-to-date information. And people may have quibbles about those data-collection efforts, but the way you address that is not to fire the person at the top or to undermine people's confidence in what you're doing. It’s to improve your collection methods so over time, we continue to be confident in the information that's flowing to us.
