It’s time to rethink how to measure work in the United States Signs of genes star-news.press/wp

toAST week Wall Street Journal I stated that, as a result of the “strict environment” in the labor market, companies “control again” and warn applicants of “long hours and a few borders.”

At the same time, some industries Reporting workers ’lack Due to the Donald Trump immigration campaign. Then there is artificial intelligence, which is about to Destroyed Job market – or is about to create New jobs.

Amid all this change, what do we really know about the job market?

Only in the last week, the Ministry of Labor said that the economy added 147,000 new jobs to the economy. This looks encouraging? But official numbers are subject to review – and large letters as well. The Ministry of Labor said that its numbers were Exaggerated By 818,000 in the first eight months of 2024.

ADP salary giant is More walking with Some of the pessimists in Wall Street, saying that the private economy was 33,000 in June. But their competitor, Paychex, I mentioned This small business worker – which represents about half of the country’s workers – continued to “keep” throughout this year. Job opportunities “jumped” to a Six months high last month. Does anyone know how to do the labor market already?

There is no economic expert, a government agency, nor an academic I know has not yet discovered the number of Americans working or not. Why? Because it is no longer just about jobs anymore. It is about income. “Jobs” data that we read is not relevant.

Last week, a report in luck He gave us the concept of “excessive work”. These workers – many in the technology industry – who keep more than one job at the same time, with some to up to $ 3,000 per day for several employers. But the excessive trend goes beyond this.

This is because in the same week, new data from Work Statistics Office He revealed what we already knew: The workers working remotely were registering two hours less per day than their counterparts to the office. So what do they do with this extra time? Perhaps they were watching Netflix. Others were generating more income for themselves doing other things, such as starting their own business.

According to new data from CensusNearly 460,000 requests were submitted to new companies in June alone, which is nearly twice the amount of the average monthly before the epidemic.

We all know these “workers”. Some have full -time multiple functions. Others have multiple part -time functions. Many of them have multiple sources of income. They are leading Uber. They have ETSY stores. They sell used sneakers on EBY and work in later transformations under the table in the local tape. They write programs. They work with data. They do everything! Do we take all these people into consideration when analyzing the “labor market”?

Some of the “excessive work” and truly paid devices need additional work to cover their expenses, unfortunately. According to a new Nerdwallet dataAlmost two of every five Americans aim to earn more money this year and 10 % have started a side company or a second job to cover the basic necessities.

In the increasingly complex “jobs” market, it is perhaps time for economists to stop evaluating the job market in terms of jobs. This soon became outdated. We need to measure income.

How many people are over 18 years old in the United States earn more than $ 50,000 a year, taking into account all modified income and inflation sources? What is the percentage of comparison with the population of working age? How did that increase or decrease over time?

Isn’t this more important than the numbers we get now? The numbers should not come from actual and real data, and not from an unreliable survey of the Ministry of Labor, which was reviewed after 10 times after publishing it in the beginning? Can we not get this information from tax declarations, social security and private sources such as ETSY, Amazon, EBay, ADP and Paychex? This cannot be calculated and updated monthly and a period annually? Of course it is possible.

The main economic policy decisions are still dependent on the rate of unemployment and the growth of jobs. Politicians are re -elected or expelled on these data. But in the labor market in which artificial intelligence, immigration and the rapid rise in side vehicles have been shaken, it is time for us to measure how to measure the health of the labor market.