April Unemployment: Good News or Bad?

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”

I’m trying to decide today whether to focus on the goods news issued in the April ADP National Employment Report or the bad news unfolding right in front of me. The ADP report is being hyped this morning by canned news sources as proof that our economy is on the mend. But a pall of suspicion lies over my office. Yesterday, in the second of two layoffs in one week’s time, my employer emptied twenty more desks and cubicles. ADP’s good news does nothing to allay the sense that my number is up next in this “death by a thousand cuts” strategy. This is not the kind of impending financial trouble that a payday loan or debt consolidation will fix.

ADP (a payroll company that pays one out of every six private sector employees in the United States) periodically compiles its National Employment Report based on non-farm private employment payrolls prepared for approximately 400,000 employers and roughly 24 million employees working in various private industrial sectors. The new unemployment figures from ADP show that companies laid off 491,000 workers last month. So far as I can discern, the good part of this good news is simply that certain analysts had forecast nearly 50 percent more private-sector layoffs than that.

“We had everything before us, we had nothing before us”

In some way that I am not particularly interested in understanding,  ADP’s report of fewer layoffs than expected for April caused, or at least coincided with, increases in US stock values and the Consumer Comfort Index. While some of April’s 491,000 newly unemployed workers may be the proud owners of improved stock portfolios or optimistic consumers with improved comfort indices, many assuredly are not. Many of April’s workforce casualties don’t have time to go shopping or  thank their lucky stars; they’re busy scrambling to find new ways to pay the rent. Whose good news is this?

It’s true that April’s 491,000 job cuts are fewer than March’s 708,000. This is news of some sort, but that’s as much as I can safely say. I’ll leave it to the noisiest of our securely employed and well paid news authorities to provide the degree of comparison, superlative or otherwise.