Photograph by Lachlan Currie

Wages are up, but inflation is up even more.

Workers in the good old USA earned $773 a week in the first quarter before taxes and other deductions, 0.5 percent more than in the same three months of 2012.

Unfortunately, the cost of living for the almost 103 million full-time workers rose three times as much — climbing 1.7 percent over the same period, according to data today from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The BLS surveys about 15,000 households and the figures reflect median wages and salaries that are usually earned and are unadjusted for seasonal changes that include weather, holidays and school openings and closings.

American men, from 45 years old to 54 years old, have benefited the most from the steady growth in the labor market over the past year. At $1,015 a week, they earned the most. By comparison, women in that same age group made $758. For all working-age men, the median increased 2.2 percent from the first quarter of 2012, more than twice the gain for women. Women earned 81.2 percent as much as their male counterparts in the first quarter.

Within the occupational groups, median earnings climbed 2.6 percent to $1,136 a week in the first quarter from the same three months last year for persons employed full time in management and professional jobs. While those employees took home the most, workers in service jobs earned the least — $501 a week.

Meantime, the wage bill for employers climbed 2.3 percent over the past year to $80.4 billion a week, reflecting median weekly wages of $773 as 1.78 million more Americans found full-time work.

Original post is Wages Up 0.5% — Cost of Living 1.7% by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg

Michigan lawmakers approved bills to prohibit mandatory union dues in workplaces as thousands of chanting protesters thronged the capitol in Lansing.

That’s the percentage of wage and salary workers who were members of a labor union in 2012, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released yesterday.

About 14.4 million of 127.6 million such workers belonged to a union last year, BLS data show. The 11.3 percent unionization rate set a record low for the third straight year, falling from 11.8 percent in 2011.

State unionization rates in 2012 generally were correlated with party preference in the November presidential election. President Barack Obama won 22 of the 25 states where at least 10 percent of workers were unionized. Republican challenger Mitt Romney won 21 of the 25 states with a unionization rate below 10 percent.

The most unionized state is New York (23.2 percent), followed by Alaska (22.5 percent), Hawaii (21.6 percent), Washington (18.5 percent) and Rhode Island (17.8 percent).

The least-unionized state is North Carolina (2.9 percent), followed by Arkansas (3.2 percent), South Carolina (3.3 percent), Mississippi (4.3 percent) and Georgia (4.4 percent).

Labor unions give campaign donations overwhelmingly to Democrats, who are more likely than Republicans to side with unions in opposing free-trade pacts and curbs in Medicare spending and supporting higher taxes for wealthy income-earners and an increase in the federal minimum wage.

“Union workers fought political leaders in states such as Wisconsin where Republican Governor Scott Walker supported legislation in 2011 curbing the collective bargaining rights of some public unions,” Bloomberg’s Jim Efstathiou Jr. wrote yesterday. “The law sparked protests outside the state’s Capitol and a 2012 recall election, in which Walker defeated Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democrat.”

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 11.3 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Myrtle Nora arranges flag buntings outside the Capitol prior to the second inauguration of President Barack Obama in Washington.

Guess where pay in the U.S. is up the most over the past decade.

Guessed Washington?

Guessed right.

From 2001 through 2011, the average annual wages in the nation’s capital rose by 4.1 percent a year — from $49,420 a year to $74,540 a year — according to an analysis by the Bloomberg Rankings team.

Its 10-year “State Wage Escalator” is built on cross-industry estimates and extracted from the annual mean wage for occupations within the states.

Wyoming ran second, with a 3.63 percent annual increase — yet the average annual wage in 2011 — $42,510 — stood well behind Washington, D.C.’s runaway average of $74,540 last year.

Virginia ranked second, at 3.42 percent — and the presence of federal contractors in the Washington-neighbor should be noted. Then came North Dakota, Maryland, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, California, Massachusetts and New Mexico.

The national average of 2.89 percent annual growth yielded an average annual wage of $45,646 last year.

Bringing up the bottom: Michigan, at 1.86 percent. Ohio and Indiana followed close behind — signs of what happened to Midwest manufacturing during the past decade. Michigan’s average wage of $43,700 last year was $30,000 less than Washington’s.

Original post is Washington Wages: Leading the Nation by Political Capital.

Photograph by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

Trucks sit outside a row of temporary housing units for oil workers in Tioga, North Dakota.

North Dakota, where an energy boom has produced the nation’s lowest unemployment rate, is adding people at a faster rate than any other state.

That’s according to an estimate released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, which said today that North Dakota increased its population by 2.17 percent in the year ended July 1, growing to 699,628 from 684,740. North Dakota’s unemployment rate was 3.1 percent in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The District of Columbia grew by 2.15 percent, followed by a string of Southern and Mountain West states where the population has surged for decades. Texas, the second-most populous state, grew by 1.67 percent and added 427,400 people during the year, more than any other state.

Texas was followed by Wyoming (1.6 percent), Utah (1.45 percent), Nevada (1.43 percent), Colorado (1.39 percent) and Arizona (1.33 percent).

Political Capital also watches the state population numbers because faster-growing states win more representation in Congress than slower-growing states when the 435 House seats are reapportioned every decade after the Census.

Florida will overtake New York as the third most-populous state sometime this decade. Florida had 19,317,568 residents to New York’s 19,570,261 on July 1, a difference of 252,693, according to the Census Bureau. New York had 419,354 more people than Florida a year earlier.

Georgia, with 9.9 million people as of July 1, supplanted Michigan as the eighth most-populous state, according to the Census Bureau estimate.

The U.S. population was about 313.9 million on July 1, up 0.75 percent and 2.3 million people from a year earlier.

Original post is North Dakota Fastest-Growing, Florida Closes in on New York by Political Capital.

Photograph by Robert A. Reeder/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Fred Malek

Putting out think tank studies to make a partisan point is a decades-long tradition in Washington.

One that came out last week offered a dose of irony to go with its claim that the Environmental Protection Agency is imposing an increasing burden of rule-compliance paperwork on the economy.

The two-page analysis, by the conservative American Action Forum, declared that “using Bureau of Labor Statistics calculations, AAF finds that EPA’s red tape burden consumes roughly $10.5 billion in annual economic activity” and “has increased by 30 million hours – 20 percent – since FY 2007.”

No word on the ethnicity of the BLS employees doing the calculating — something that at one time would have been of great interest to AAF’s founder and board chairman, Fred Malek.

Malek was a White House aide when he compiled a list of BLS employees with Jewish-sounding last names at the request of President Richard Nixon, who was worried that a “Jewish cabal” had too much influence in the agency.

Malek, who went on to become a venture capitalist and a Republican fundraising stalwart, apologized for his actions. But the BLS incident remains a lightning rod, especially for Democrats, who sharply criticized Virginia Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell when he appointed Malek to head a government reform task force in 2010.

Malek’s AAF board colleagues include former Netscape CEO James Barksdale, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman.

The board also includes at least one political figure who could make eventual use of Malek’s fundraising prowess – former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, a potential GOP presidential candidates in 2016.

USA Today clip on Malek’s stature as a Republican fundraiser:

Malek bio from AAF website:

Original post is Malek’s Study Cites Labor Bureau Once Suspected of `Cabal’ by Political Capital.

Four years ago, the leaders huddled in their boardroom and asked the question: How can we win back market share? Rather than push into new markets, Republican Inc. decided to shrink its appeal by making its product unattractive to women and Hispanics.

Decades ago, companies like Ford Motor Co. and Verizon Communications Inc. figured out the link between revenue growth and demographics. They asked questions like: Who is in the next big wave of household formation?

(See the full story at Bloomberg.com.)

The companies are keen students of data like this: Of the 47 million new workers entering the labor force between 2010 and 2050, a projected 37.6 million, or 80 percent, will be Hispanic, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report in October. The Latino share of the workforce will grow to 18.6 percent by 2020 and to 30 percent in 2050, doubling from 15 percent in 2010, according to the BLS.

Verizon and Ford have a marketing strategy for Latinos, and it’s working. Ford’s light-duty vehicle sales volume to Hispanics rose about 25 percent this year through June, compared with a 9.7 percent increase in total sales, according to Polk, a Southfield, Michigan, auto-marketing research company. About 11 percent of Verizon’s workforce is Hispanic. It trains its installation and in-store teams to work with Latinos, and it markets to them in English and Spanish with people like Jennifer Lopez.

American companies also asked: Who are the new decision makers when it comes to consumption?

Again, the data show rising labor force participation and educational attainment by women over the last several decades. Some 52 percent of all persons employed in management, professional and related occupations were women in 2010, according to the BLS, higher than their 47 percent share of total employment.

Elections work on two levels, says Andrew Laperriere, an analyst at International Strategy & Investment Group in Washington. Members of Congress can take extreme positions that matter to their local constituents. But it is up to the presidential candidate to re-brand the party toward a broader public, he said. That didn’t happen in the most recent election, in which extreme views coming from local races seemed to position the entire Republican Party as against women and immigrants.

“The next Republican presidential candidate will have to redefine the party on issues that matter to Latinos” and minority women, Laperriere said.

Original post is Have You Run a Republican Lately? by Political Capital.

Photograph by Eddie Seal/Bloomberg

Job seekers fill out applications at the Rigzone Oil & Gas Career Fair in San Antonio, Texas.

After millions of Americans already have voted early in the presidential election of 2012, the final government snapshot of the labor market in the U.S. before Election Day shows that unemployment stood at 7.9 percent in October.

The addition of 171,000 jobs is a  significant gain, in comparison with recent months, yet the jobless rate inched up a notch.

The jobless rate is is  up one-tenth of a percentage point  from the 7.8 percent unemployment rate reported for September, the lowest rate since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009 and the first dip below 8 percent joblessness in 44 months.

Symbolically, it remains just below 8 percent heading into the Nov. 6 election.

On the campaign trail, Republican Mitt Romney has portrayed the persisting high rate of unemployment as a measure of Obama’s economic failures. The president, in turn, has maintained that much more work remains to be done, yet much progress has been made.

It’s likely too late in the election campaign for any new number to have a meaningful impact on Tuesday’s vote, with Obama and Romney making their closing arguments in the campaign. Obama will make three appearances today in Ohio, a state with a significantly improving economy.  Romney will campaign there as well as in Wisconsin today.

Original post is 7.9% Unemployment: Election Day by Political Capital.

Photograph by Scott Eells/Bloomberg

Job seekers speaks with an employer at the Veterans On Wall Street job fair in New York.

At least one Bureau of Labor Statistics staffer is willing to upset the White House, despite what you may have heard.

Jim Borbely, an economist with the federal agency responsible for reporting unemployment figures, was ready to go toe-to-toe with the president over veterans’ jobless data after the final debate last week. Problem is, nobody asked him for his take.

President Barack Obama told the 59.2 million people who watched the third and final Oct. 22 presidential debate that “the first lady has done great work with an organization called Joining Forces putting our veterans back to work.”

“And as a consequence, veterans’ unemployment is actually now lower than the general population,” Obama said. “It was higher when I came into office.”

At work the next day, Borbely grabbed the debate transcript and the jobs data, and fact-checked the president.

“It didn’t quite match up,” Borbely said. It “was not a totally correct statement.”

When Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, the veteran unemployment rate was 7.4 percent, already lower than the 7.8 percent rate for the total population. If Obama meant to refer to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, he’d be wrong there too –they’re worse off now than when Obama took office. That group had a jobless rate of 9.7 percent in September 2012, up from 8.9 percent in January 2009.

Borbely said he didn’t get any calls about the issue.

Still, he said he wanted to be ready because the bureau took some heat from the public after it reported that U.S. unemployment had dropped to 7.8 percent in September.

Jack Welch, the former General Electric Co. chief executive officer, alleged the economic data may have been manipulated to show job gains shortly before the presidential election.

“We did get a lot of angry and nasty phone calls accusing us of doing all sorts of things that we weren’t doing so we wanted to prepare,” Borbely said. “We try to inform the public about what happens, but sometimes they don’t want to hear it.”

Original post is Labor Stood Ready on Veteran Data — Nobody Called After Last Debate by Political Capital.

“Tampa-St.Pete.-Clearwater and Miami area experienced largest unemployment rate declines in country,” the Republican governor tweeted @FlGovScott.

He linked to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report in that Friday message: “Unemployment rates were lower in August than a year earlier in 325 of the 372 metropolitan areas, higher in 40 areas, and unchanged in 7 areas.”

“Twenty-seven of the metropolitan divisions recorded over-the-year jobless rate decreases in August, while seven registered increases. Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, Fla., posted the largest rate decline from a year earlier (-2.0 percentage points),” the BLS reported Oct. 5.

Josh Earnest, the principal deputy White House press secretary, who made note of Scott’s Twitter report today, told the press pool that the president would be talking about this today (at a University of Miami campus campaign rally in the biggest of all swing states):

“You’ll hear from the president a little bit more today about what he believes that we should do to build on that progress and to build on what we can do to help our economy in south Florida and communities all across the country recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” Earnest said.

.

Original post is Florida’s First Tweeter Noted Aboard Air Force One: Miami Looking Up by Political Capital.

no credit

Sen. John McCain appearing on CNBC's Power Lunch to discuss the jobs report.

Updated at 4:05 pm EDT

If the dip in unemployment below 8 percent came as an October surprise in the presidential election contest underway, the rumblings of a conspiracy theory have the makings of another politically volatile story.

None other than Senator John McCain, the Republican Party’s 2008 presidential nominee, has placed a casual blessing on the comments of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch about the Obama administration manipulating the data for the president’s re-election.

“Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers,” Welch said in a message posted on his Twitter account immediately after the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent in September, the lowest since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009.

McCain, when asked on CNBC today about Welch’s comment on employment data manipulation, said he “wouldn’t put anything past this administration.” He also said he’s “not enough of an economist” to interpret the jobs data  – something that was born out toward the end of his own campaign, in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, when he called the American economy fundamentally sound.

The Obama administration calls the allegation baseless and defends the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which computes the figures. Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told Bloomberg Television that Welch’s remark was “irresponsible.”

Welch’s remarks were heard ’round the Twitter world.

As Bloomberg’s Tim Catts reports:  “Welch’s own profile assured that his message would attract attention, and Twitter users had resent the comment 2,361 times as of noon in New York. His success as GE’s CEO for 20 years through 2001 and as a business-book author has made him one of the nation’s most-recognized retired executives. ”

“His words ring louder than many others and that’s just the fact of life for a CEO, especially a well-known corporate  icon type CEO that he has been,” said Peter Thies, a senior partner at Los Angeles-based executive search firm Korn/Ferry International.”

“These numbers don’t smell right, when you think about where the economy is right now,” Welch said in an interview this afternoon with Neil Cavuto on FOX News. “That’s why I tweeted.”

The data are based on “assumptions,” Welch told Cavuto. “It’s just ironic that these assumptions came this way the month before the election — you draw your own conclusions.”

Still, the allegation from a Romney campaign supporter rings hollow.

““No serious person would question the integrity of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” Krueger said on Bloomberg Television. “These numbers are put together by career employees. They use the same process every month. So I think comments like that are irresponsible.”

Which won’t necessarily stop it from spreading in the political sphere, with a little help from McCain, who lost that 2008 election to Obama.

“Frankly I am not enough of an economist to question those numbers,” McCain said at 1:27 pm in his CNBC appearance. “I wouldn’t put anything past this administration.”

Original post is McCain Wouldn’t `Put Anything Past’ Obama — Giving Welch a Lift by Political Capital.