by Calculated Risk on 11/04/2011 12:21:00 PM

Here are the earlier employment posts (with graphs):
• October Employment Report: 80,000 Jobs, 9.0% Unemployment Rate
• Employment Summary, Part Time Workers, and Unemployed over 26 Weeks
• NEW Employment graph gallery (fast, no scripting)

And a few more graphs ...

Seasonal Retail Hiring
According to the BLS employment report, retailers hired seasonal workers at close to the pre-crisis pace in October.

Click on graph for larger image.

Typically retail companies start hiring for the holiday season in October, and really increase hiring in November. Here is a graph that shows the historical net retail jobs added for October, November and December by year.

This really shows the collapse in retail hiring in 2008, and the increases in 2009 and 2010.

Retailers hired 141.5 thousand workers (NSA) net in October. This is about the same level as in 2003 through 2006 and the same as in 2010. Note: this is NSA (Not Seasonally Adjusted).

This suggests retailers are somewhat optimistic about the holiday season.

Duration of Unemployment
This graph shows the duration of unemployment as a percent of the civilian labor force. The graph shows the number of unemployed in four categories: less than 5 week, 6 to 14 weeks, 15 to 26 weeks, and 27 weeks or more.

Only one category increased in October: The 6 to 14 weeks. This is due to the increase in short term unemployment in August and September. A little bit of recent good news is that short term unemployment (less than 5 weeks) has declined.

The the long term unemployed declined to 3.8% of the labor force - the number (and percent) of long term unemployed remains very high.

Unemployment by Education
This graph shows the unemployment rate by four levels of education (all groups are 25 years and older).

Unfortunately this data only goes back to 1992 and only includes one previous recession (the stock / tech bust in 2001). Clearly education matters with regards to the unemployment rate - and it appears all four groups are generally trending down.

Although education matters for the unemployment rate, it doesn't appear to matter as far as finding new employment (all four categories are only gradually declining).

Note: This says nothing about the quality of jobs - as an example, a college graduate working at minimum wage would be considered "employed".

Diffusion Indexes
This is a little more technical. The BLS diffusion index for total private employment was at 60.7 in October, up from 56.7 in September. For manufacturing, the diffusion index increased to 51,9, up from 50 in September.

Think of this as a measure of how widespread job gains are across industries. The further from 50 (above or below), the more widespread the job losses or gains reported by the BLS. From the BLS:

Figures are the percent of industries with employment increasing plus one-half of the industries with unchanged employment, where 50 percent indicates an equal balance between industries with increasing and decreasing employment.

It appears job growth is spread across more industries in October, and that is a little bit of good news.

We'd like to see the diffusion indexes consistently above 60 - and even in the 70s like in the '1990s.