Uninspiring April BLS Report May Include ‘Phantom Jobs’

From the April Bureau of Labor Statistics report, throw out everything except this: wages increased 0.1 percent. A three-cents-an-hour wage increase for employees on nonfarm payrolls to an average $24.87 does little to raise Americans’ standard of living, especially for those working the average 34.5 hours per week. Those statistics do, however, support the opinion that adding 18 million immigrants to the labor pool since 2000 has been a major contributor to wage stagnation.

Less immigration would mean more working Americans.

A recent Congressional Research Service study not only linked mass immigration to depressed wages, but proved that adding more immigrants to the economy, as President Obama’s executive action amnesty would do, would further depress U.S. wages.

After studying the monthly BLS reports, New York Post economist John Crudele has come up with an interesting angle. According to Crudele, the BLS uses “trick statistics” when it announces its springtime jobs picture. Skeptics already know that because the BLS doesn’t include Americans who have given up looking for jobs – what Gallup CEO Jim Clifton called “the big lie” – the declining unemployment rate is purposely misleading. Adding to that deception, Crudele says that the BLS includes “phantom jobs” in its statistics.

As the BLS sees it, spring means good weather which in turn translates into more business startups, and therefore more jobs. Last May, according to Crudele, the BLS included 263,000 “phantom jobs.” Crudele predicted that this April’s official numbers would be “an illusion, misleading, and a joke,” that journalists would report “without question.”

Other data from the April report: 223,000 new jobs created, the unemployment rate declined to 5.4 percent, and the labor participation rate increased 0.1 percent to 62.8 percent, its lowest level in 35 years.