by Calculated Risk on 1/06/2012 12:29:00 PM

Here are the earlier employment posts:
• December Employment Report: 200,000 Jobs, 8.5% Unemployment Rate
• Employment Summary, Part Time Workers, and Unemployed over 26 Weeks
• Employment graph gallery (fast, no scripting)

And a few more graphs ...

Seasonal Retail Hiring
According to the BLS, retailers hired seasonal workers at the pre-recession pace in 2011.

Click on graph for larger image.

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

Retailers hired 718.5 thousand workers (NSA) net this year. This is about the same level as in 2006 and 2007. Note: this is NSA (Not Seasonally Adjusted).

This suggests a fairly strong 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.

All categories are moving down (the less than 5 week category is back to normal levels). The other categories are still high.

The the long term unemployed declined to 3.6% of the labor force - this is still very high, but the lowest since September 2009.

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.

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 61.2 in December, up from 50.7 in November. For manufacturing, the diffusion index increased to 56.8, up from 40.7 in November.

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 was spread across more industries in December (good news).

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