Labor Statistics Quotes

The first Friday of every month is what we call Numbers Day - it's the day that the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the monthly jobs report. We have a ritual at the Labor Department - at 8 A.M., we gather around a table in my office, and the commissioner of labor statistics briefs me and the department's senior leadership on the numbers.

About 14 percent of our nation's civilian workforce is foreign-born.

The Obama economy has led to the lowest labor force participation since 1978.

Until the early 20th century, significant economic hardship was so woven into human history and experience that it wasn’t yet seen as an aberration. Only the combination of a severe crisis and the belief that such crises not only could but should be prevented by collective government action led to the creation of unemployment statistics.

Every month, we get the reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that say even more people have given up looking for work.

Less than 8 percent of private sector workers belonged to a union in 2004, and, overall, only 12.5 percent of American workers carry a union card - down from about one-third of workers in labor's heydays in the 1950s.

[M]ore Americans work for federal, state or local government than work in any form of manufacturing. We crossed that Rubicon about 10 years ago.

We need to know what are the best jobs for which we can train young people so that the jobs will be available in growing numbers, are not dead end jobs, the jobs will not be obsoleted by automation, and there are no artificial ethnic or racial barriers to employment. Your Bureau of Labor Statistics has been working on this for 8 weeks now, and you come with your staff and say that you do not have sufficient data to make this judgment. Well if there were sufficient data, we could apply it and make the decisions without you. The reason we need your expertise is that your intuition and experience should enable you to make a better guess with the insufficient information than we would make who have no experience.

More Americans are working today than at any time in history.

The number of people, the labor force, has shrunk by nine million human beings since Obama took office.

The unemployment rate has effectively not gone down from where it was at the peak of the recession. The only reason it's gone technically from 10 percent to 8 percent is so many people are discouraged and have quit work.

Many of the statistics that have been cited in the stories of sexual revolution are reflections instead of the Industrial Revolution. The entrance of women into the work force has accompanied, at a slower pace, their departure from farms. As recently as eighty years ago 36 percent of American families were engaged in agriculture; today fewer than three percent are. This shift is truly a revolution, and it has transformed the official labor statistics for women. Although these statistics show women entering the work force in record numbers, the fact is that women have always worked. Their labor on farms, however—in an array of arduous jobs beyond the hearth and cribside—;was never monitored by statisticians.

The unemployment rate is not real.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, before NAFTA went into effect, there were 285,000 auto workers in Michigan. Today, that number is only 160,000.