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Employment in the first half:
robust recovery continues
Employment grew throughout the first half of 1984, as a very strong cyclical recovery continued through its fifth and sixth quarters. Unemployment, after posting declines in January and February , was essentially unchanged through April before dropping sharply in May and June. In June, the overall unemployment rate (including the resident military in the labor force) was 7.0 percent, and the Unemployment rate for civilian workers was 7.1 percent.
By June, total employment, as measured by the household survey,1 and nonfarm payroll employment, as measured the establishment survey,2 had surpassed the levels registered before the recession began in July 1981.3 The unemployment rates had returned to prerecession levels, having fallen 3.6 percentage points from their highest point.
This article will briefly describe seasonally adjusted labor force data for the first 6 months of 1984, examine the recovery in employment in comparison to earlier cycles, and discuss those industries where lingering problems of unemployment and slow recovery are concentrated.
This excerpt is from an article published in the August 1984 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
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1 The Current Population Survey (CPS) is conducted monthly by the Census Bureau on behalf of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey is conducted among a scientifically selected sample of about 60,000 households and provides information on labor force, employment, and unemployment by a variety of demographic and economic characteristics.
2 Data from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program are collected from the payroll records of nearly 200,000 nonagricultural establishments by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in cooperation with State agencies. This survey provides estimates of the number of persons on payrolls of business, their average hours, and their average hourly and weekly earnings.
3 The identification of turning points in the business cycle is, by general consensus of the economics profession, carried out by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private institution based in Cambridge, Mass.
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Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey
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