It’s official. Starting June 20th, I’ll be unemployed for 3 months until my new contract begins. (We’ll be fine)
The circumstances of how one loses their job can vary and so are the reactions people have to it happening:
Some see job loss as the end of the world. All the years of hard work and loyalty wasted!
Others see losing a job as opportunity to break free from rut and take a leap forward to something new
Still others experience employment gaps on such a regular or semi-regular basis, they just move on with their day
No matter which you fall under and whether anyone wants to admit or not, Job loss is a major emotional event and usually comes with the classic 5 stages of Grief
5 Stages of Grief
Next week we’ll have some suggestions to make the experience tolerable
Despite all the emotional swings involved in job status, Wall Street distills employment down to just a few economic stats meant to theoretically “represent” the mood of people, the businesses involved and the economy at large.
In reality, the markets play the weekly jobless claims number like the local Pick 3 Lotto. Week after week, picking their estimate and positioning accordingly to try to make money with little regard for what the numbers actually represent.
There are 3 main labor reports that markets react to and each have their quirks.
Weekly Jobless Claims published by The U.S. Dept of Labor
Two categories of jobless claims—initial, which comprises people filing for the first time, and continuing, which consists of unemployed people who have already been receiving unemployment benefits
Many call this a leading indicator to predict recessions, but I tend to think it serves better as a “healing” indicator to show how fast things are returning to normal after a shock
ADP Private Payroll (National Employment Report)
The ADP National Employment Report is a MONTHLY independent estimate of the change in U.S. private employment and pay.
The values are derived from actual, anonymized payroll data of client companies served by ADP.
Basically, you probably get an auto debited paycheck every 2 weeks but if you actually go look at the Paystub PDF, you’ll probably see a company logo in the corner of who does the processing work. If it’s ADP , you are counted in this published value
Data totally skews toward current ADP clients. ADP payroll data covers only half a million companies and about 25 million employees so much of the economy is omitted
U.S. NonFarm Payrolls published by The U.S. Dept of Labor
I’ve always loved how they need to explicitly exclude farm jobs. Agriculture and its related industries provide 10.5 percent of U.S. employment. In 2021, 21.1 million full- and part-time jobs were related to the agricultural and food sectors. So none of these are included.
This is the report where the U-3: Official unemployment rate comes from. Per the ILO definition, you are counted as unemployed when you are without a job and they have actively looked for work within the past four weeks
Thoughts? Questions? Comments?
Reach out! Maybe I’ll do a full post on the topic or as a Q&A