A record net 37% of owners reported they are raising overall compensation in hopes of hiring and retaining employees in what is increasingly cited as the tightest labor market in decades.
Despite the strong wage growth, a deeper dive reveals aggressive, weather-related, contractions in several industries including Retail (-20K), Telecom (-3K), Education (-12K), Child Care (-4K) and Food Services (-23K).
While hardly the blockbuster report Trump was hoping for - with a big miss in September payrolls mostly due to last month's hurricane - prior months were revised sharply higher, while hourly earnings came in line, as the unemployment rate dropped to a fresh 49 year low.
If Citi is right, prepare for a big miss in hourly earnings: we have almost always, since 2010, printed 0.1% or below in the month following a print of 0.4% or larger.
“Bezos is no fool. He will reduce his headcount, and step up his automation effort to eliminate as many low-skilled jobs from Amazon. Then he will lobby Congress to increase the minimum wage for his competitors that still employ lower-skilled workers..."
"Yesterday's record 62.4 reading for the ISM employment component would ‘imply' a 500k increase in private sector jobs, which would be the best since 1983."
"This is the great irony of the claim that public school teachers are underpaid. By socializing education, state governments have removed the very market forces that determine wages. So there is no way to measure what a teacher actually 'should' be paid."
"As with so much of American life, the inconvenient realities may upset somebody, so better to stick with magical-thinking or politically-correct truisms that are completely out of touch with reality but oh-so-acceptable to the status quo."
"If you struggle to make money, you don’t hire more workers nor enthusiastically bid up the price for them. It is just that simple: economics, not Economics. Not only is it simple, that’s what all the data shows."
Julie Swetnick, the third woman to accuse Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct in high school, faced allegations from her former employer that she engaged in “unwelcome, sexually offensive conduct” in 2000.
