ADP says private sector added only 55,000 net jobs in May.

[Statistical]

Due to rising population we need about 125,000 net jobs each month just to avoid employment % from falling. Demographics mean the workforce population will rise until about 2013-2015. Any jobs less than 125,000 is in essence a reduction in jobs when you consider new people joining workforce.

The only "good news" is that ADP is sometimes wrong and wrong by a lot. Some of the early estimates were like 140,000 to 160,000 net private sector jobs.

[scheming daemons]

1. ADP revised April's number from +32K to +65K too... their initial numbers have been lowballed

Watch... next month they'll upgrade this month's numbers from +55K to something close to +100K.


ADP has been missing the surge in new small businesses.

[Hosnon]

3. I recently read (on CalculatedRisk I think) that ADP is not considered to be an accurate measure. nt

[dmallind]

2. I think they said 32K last month to 290K survey numbers, but their variation goes both ways

No way to know really as they are completely different datapoints, but at least ADP says growth, ehile still anemic, is better than THEY said last month. What relationship it might have to BLS numbers is up in the air.

[conscious evolution]

4. Are those numbers

domestic or international?
They are a global corporation,after all.

[Statistical]

5. They are total US private payroll.

So domestic but it isn't ADP hiring 55,000 people but rather ADP estimate that US companies combined created a net increase of 55,000 jobs.

[conscious evolution]

7. estimate or

the number of new hires added to their payroll service?

[Statistical]

8. It is an estimate for entire US workforce.

ADP provides payroll services for about half the companies in the US thus they use their data to provide an estimate (kind a like a political poll doesn't call every single voter in the United States) for overall employment.

[dmallind]

6. On perusing historical comparisons

I noted that using numbers in thousands of new jobs (you have to create this column from their historical data Excel sheet) while their historical average correlation is .95, in the last ten months since the technical end of this last recession as measured by GDP they have avarage a -.019 ratio, heavily skewed by earlier predictions of losses that became gains. In the last three months since both ADP and BLS have shown gains the average is .171.

Now three points is a bit weak to say the least to use for extrapolation but if we did we'd get a possible BLS number of about 322K new jobs in May. Might be a mite optimistic but not too much IMO.