What does this mean for the bottom line?
Well, had the BLS reported flat average weekly hours worked at 34.6 as Wall Street had expected, while companies were paying out the same amount of hourly wages in April, the result would have been that instead of the BLS reporting a 165,000 increase in jobs, it would have had to report a drop of, drumroll, 618 thousand workers, or total April workers of 134,690,913: a 783 thousand negative worker swing, more than wiping out not only all the gains of April, but all prior upward monthly revisions as well.
MarketWatch adds some granularity:
Some analysts applauded the 29,000 gain in retail-sector jobs in April as a sign that consumer spending is holding up well in the face of the fiscal drag caused by the tax hikes and government spending cuts.
But aggregate weekly hours worked in retail plunged by 0.7% in April, which is the equivalent of cutting 11,000 jobs. Suddenly, the report doesn’t look so rosy.
So productivity increases? Economic Recovery? Or just the BLS (such an expert in dropping the unemployment rate at the expense of the Labor Force Participation rate) showing its exquisite familiarity with the law of large numbers?
You decide.
