ADP Employment Report - A Lousy 119,000 Additional Private Sector Jobs for April 2013

ADP's proprietary private payrolls jobs report shows a gained of 119,000 private sector jobs for April 2013.  ADP revised their March job figures down by 27,000 to 131 thousand.  February's tally was revised down by 39,000 to a total of 198 thousand private sector jobs gained for the month.  This is the weakest monthly ADP reported private sector job growth since August 2012.  This report does not include government, or public jobs.

 

adp graph of private jobs

 

Most of the jobs gains were in the service sector and this month services added 113,000 private sector jobs.  The goods sector added only 6,000 jobs  Professional/business services jobs grew by 20,000.  Trade/transportation/utilities showed strong growth again with 29,000 jobs.  Financial activities payrolls increased by 7,000.

Construction work added 15,000 jobs.   Manufacturing was a disaster, with a loss of 10,000 jobs, the worst losses since September 2012 as well as the first decline for manufacturing jobs in three months.  Graphed below are the month job gains or losses for the five areas ADP covers, manufacturing (maroon), construction (blue), professional & business (red), trade, transportation & utilities (green) and financial services (orange).

 

 

ADP reports payrolls by business size, unlike the official BLS report.  Small business, 1 to 49 employees, added 50,000 jobs with establishments having less than 20 employees adding 34,000 of those jobs.  Medium sized business payrolls are defined as 50-499 employees, added they added 26,000 jobs.  Large business added 43 thousand to their payrolls.   If we take the breakdown further, large businesses with greater than 1,000 workers, added a total of 35,000 jobs.  Thing is, we do not know if those are American workers or foreign guest workers on Visas.  Other metrics showed large businesses not hiring Americans, in the United States.

Below is the graph of ADP private sector job creation breakdown of large businesses (bright red), median business (blue) and small business (maroon), by the above three levels.  For large business jobs, the scale is on the right of the graph.  Medium and Small businesses' scale is on the left.

 

ADP large, medium, small private sector jobs

 

One of the more interesting aspects of the ADP report is the breakdown of the private sector by service producing and goods producing jobs.  The service sector are disproportionately lower paying jobs as a whole in comparison to goods producing jobs, even while including the financial, professional and business services sectors are part of services.  Below is the graph of ADP service sector (maroon, scale left) jobs against their goods production jobs (blue, scale right).

 

service sector vs. goods adp

 

This report, if it matches Friday's official unemployment report, would overall imply overall not enough job growth to keep up with population, but this is just the private sector job growth.   Government jobs will surely be negative as the sequester continues to take its toll.  The U.S. needs about 120,000 jobs per month, minimum just to keep up with population growth, with the same lousy, artificially low, labor participation rates.

The monthly BLS jobs survey (CES) has a 100,000 payroll jobs overall margin of error.  ADP changed their methodology and now claim to match the BLS private payrolls, but only historically, after revisions.  The below graph shows shows how many private sector payroll jobs, each month, ADP was off by in comparison to what the BLS reported.   This is a monthly graph, not cumulative.  As we can see, it's been rare where the two monthly reports get the exact same private payrolls growth numbers.   When the below graph bar is negative, that means the BLS reported a larger number of private jobs than ADP did, when the graph bar is positive, it means ADP reported larger private payrolls.  Again, compared are private sector jobs which is different from the BLS headline number.   This graph will be updated with the April BLS jobs report.

 

ADP vs. BLS

 

Below is the cumulative difference between what the ADP reports as the private nonfarm payroll jobs vs. the BLS (ADP minus BLS).  This line shows the divergence, over time in number of nonfarm private payroll jobs reported between the two reports.  Previously the difference between ADP and BLS was around 400,000, now we see the cumulative error more in line with the real BLS CES survey margin of error.  Here again we see a massive change in the ADP private payrolls methodology and benchmarking.  ADP claims their private payrolls cover 24 million jobs with 416 thousand businesses in the U.S.   This graph will be updated with the April BLS private non-farm payrolls data.

 

ADP vs. BLS private payrolls

 

The graph below is the monthly change of private jobs as reported by ADP.  At the absolutely bare minimum, the United States needs 1.2 million jobs per year, or 100,000 per month, total jobs, including public sector jobs, to keep up with additional new workers in the labor supply caused by population growth with the current terrible labor market conditions assumed and assuming labor participation rates continue to deteriorate.

 

 

Regardless of the statistical differences between ADP and the BLS, these payroll figures are none too swell, especially with America's five year, three months employment crisis.

Here is our overview of last month's ADP private sector jobs report overview, only graphs revised.  This article goes into the methodology details on the ADP report changes and compares historical data of the two methodologies in graphs.

ADP themselves have really improved the visuals on their website for more perspectives, breakdowns and charts of their statistics.

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