Jared Bernstein Labor Quotations

Given the growth of the population and labor force and improvements in productivity, we need to be adding somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 jobs per month to nudge unemployment down.

These are workers who have the weakest bargaining leverage and are most likely to be exploited, particularly in a period where you have a weak labor demand and a large labor supply.

There is no reason to believe...that Congress has authorized the Department of Labor to dramatically reduce coverage...taking overtime protection away from millions of workers. Yet that is exactly what the Department of Labor has proposed.

People think unemployment is still relatively low, but there's all the difference in the world between a tight labor market and a weak one when you're talking about employees' ability to bargain for a fair share of growth.

Folks are coming back into the labor market, but they're not finding jobs there. The tepid pace of job growth was too low to keep unemployment from rising. We're looking at a fairly weak recovery, at least initially.

This doesn't look like a significantly different report than we've gotten in past months, but that's significant in itself. The labor market is clearly stuck in neutral.

This could mean that the labor market is another area coming on line in the nation's recovery.

The weakness in the labor market is clearly reducing the growth of earnings, meaning consumers, most of who depend on their paychecks, are likely to remain insecure about where the economy is headed. This in turn has the potential to constrain consumption growth, limiting the boost that the economy will get from the recent tax cut, and delaying the arrival of a truly self-sustaining recovery.

You need to create ever more jobs in order to absorb increases in the labor force as well as productivity gains.

This is a pretty negative report. The reason unemployment ticked down is the labor force contracted. That suggests fewer people are getting into the game, looking for work, and that kind of discouragement can lead to a lower unemployment rate.

I'm not sure this report convinces us that a recovery is underway in the labor market in any big way.

These top line numbers suggest we are into what's beginning to look like a jobless recovery. We simply can't drive unemployment down if we're only adding 30 or 40,000 jobs. So, basically, we're looking at a situation where the recovery is calling, but the labor market isn't really picking up the phone.

These numbers reveal a labor market that's not bouncing back quickly enough to absorb new entrants along with the people laid off during the downturn.

Any large fall in labor force participation at this point suggests that the labor market is not growing out of recession, but rather that discouraged job seekers are giving up, or not beginning, their job search.

A number of other reports suggest the labor market is finally hitting its stride, one weekly claims number is not enough to undermine that conclusion.