Who are we to call an employment report “healthy”?
The 235,000 added jobs might look “healthy,” but there’s plenty of information buried in the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics report that could inform other interpretations.
For example, if you look at “total nonfarm” figures in the February report, you see that the difference between the number of jobs in January was only 0.16 percent. Some might say there’s nothing “healthy” about that. You would also find that the number of retail jobs, many of which pay very little, fell 0.16 percent. (The retail trade as counted by the BLS, though, includes cashiers and people who work in the financial industry. Cashiers and finance workers probably have very different definitions of “healthy.”)
Meanwhile, “average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls increased by 6 cents to $26.09, following a 5-cent increase in January,” the BLS news release says. A lot of those retail workers make a lot less than $26.09 an hour.
There are several important lessons here:
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Many tax liens and civil judgments soon will be taken off people’s credit reports, the latest move to omit negative information from the powerful financial scorecards. – Wall Street Journal
“Elegant variation” is employed when a writer struggles to come up with a synonym for a perfectly usable noun. “Elongated yellow fruit” (for “banana”) is perhaps the best-known example of the aberration, as documented for years by professor Fred Vultee on Headsup: The Blog.
It’s mildly surprising to see the Wall Street Journal lower itself to such a hackneyed device.
Phillip Blanchard is a former business editor at the Washington Post. Previously he worked at the Chicago Sun-Times and newspapers in upstate New York. He is founder of Testy Copy Editors. Email: blanp@testycopyeditors.org
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