Here's a quote form George Will's latest screed in the Washington Post to get us going:
Private-sector job creation almost stopped in May. The 41,000 jobs created were dwarfed by the 411,000 temporary and low-wage government jobs needed to administer the census. Last year's stimulus having failed to hold unemployment below 8 percent as predicted, Barack Obama might advocate another stimulus -- amending Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, which mandates a census every 10 years. If it were every year, he could take credit for creating 564,000 -- the current number of census takers -- permanent jobs.
Now, it's not just George Will who keeps adding this asterisk, her's NPR's Jacob Goldstein:
The U.S. economy added 431,000 new jobs in May, the federal government said this morning. Sounds promising.
But dig a little deeper, and the number doesn't look so nice. Almost all of those jobs — 411,000 of them — were temporary employees hired to work on the census. Those jobs typically last only for a few months.
The private sector added only 41,000 jobs during the month. It's much lower than what economists were expecting, and far fewer jobs than private employers added in April. It suggests the economic recovery is slowing.
And they did the same thing in early April, reporting on March's numbers. NPR's Scott Neuman:
The addition of 162,000 jobs was the best labor report in three years, but temporary hiring for the U.S. Census and a rebound from February's snowstorms accounted for a substantial portion of the increase. The increase still fell short of most the expectations of most analysts, who had expected the figure to be around 190,000.
At this point I will add, in the interests of full disclosure, that I'm one of the temporary census employees. I will now explain why you, too, should be offended by the asterisk that mindless reporters keep adding when they're reporting job numbers.
- Lots of jobs are temporary Remember the nineties when a lot of jobs involved data entry? Businesses were phasing out paper and adding computers and hiring temps for the transition. Sometimes, permanent positions resulted, often they didn't. Or how about three years ago, when a lot of the gainfully employed people in my age cohort worked for companies as....BUYERS. Think about that. Buyers. Not producing anything. For heaven's sake, that doesn't get an asterisk? Are you kidding me?
So the question is why are census jobs being singled out as illegitimate? I think I can be forgiven for concluding that it's got more to do with the fact that they're not private sector jobs than the fact that they're temporary. This leads right to my second issue, to wit...
- They're presupposing that the census bureau is not producing a quality product. (How could the government possibly produce anything of value?) In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Decennial census data has immense value. It's used by businesses, and by government at all levels to make informed decisions. It's used by advertisers, by banks, and by insurance companies.
Here are fifty ways census data are used.
- The public/private dichotomy is pretty mushy anyway To give a trivial example: did you know that there are companies that specialize in counting inventory for large retail stores? The need for such companies was created by the Sarbanes-Oxley act. The recent health bill will certainly give a boost to private sector health insurance jobs. And do I need to mention companies that bid on government contracts?
- The 2010 census is providing a unique networking opportunity for many, many Americans During my tour as a crew leader, I've gotten a chance to see people who otherwise might not have work put their problem solving skills, their foreign language skills, and their organizational abilities to good use, learning and growing in the process. I've been asked to write more than a couple letters of recommendations for people currently hunting for work. How exactly is this bad for the "private" economy?
So let's stop telling our friends, neighbors, and family members that their jobs don't count. These guys are pounding the pavement in hot summer weather, often in dangerous neighborhoods, quite possibly putting their lives on the line to defend our democracy. They're heroes, and I loved getting to work with them.