Upcoming Changes to the Employment Situation News Release on February 5, 2010

Overview

Beginning with the release of data for January 2010 on February 5, 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) plans to implement several changes to the content and format of the Employment Situation news release. Changes will be reflected in both the text and tables.

Summary tables

Both the household survey and the establishment survey will now provide separate summary tables, which contain the most commonly used data series from each section of the release. These two summary tables will immediately follow the text analysis describing the monthly data. They replace Table A in the current version of the news release.

Household survey data from the Current Population Survey (CPS)

Three new tables will be added to the household survey section ("A tables") of the release. These new tables cover the employment status of veterans, persons with a disability, and the foreign born. (Data on these persons have been collected in the CPS previously, but now are being added to this news release.) In addition, two new seasonally adjusted series are being added to the table showing unemployment by reason; specifically, the series for permanent job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs.

Establishment survey data from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey

New data on all employee hours and earnings will be added to the Employment Situation news release starting with this release. The text and tables ("B tables") will reflect these additions. BLS also will publish CES data on employment of women and production and nonsupervisory workers in the Employment Situation release each month concurrent with the newest-available establishment survey employment data; previously, employment data on women were available with a one-month lag and were not published in the Employment Situation news release.

The establishment survey tables in the news release will be redesigned to incorporate the addition of the all employee hours and earnings and employment series for women and for production and nonsupervisory workers. The redesigned tables will display seasonally adjusted data, while the CES public database will contain both seasonally adjusted and not seasonally adjusted data. Some diffusion indexes and industry level detail for manufacturing production worker hours, earnings, and indexes of aggregate weekly hours will be removed from the CES tables in the news release, but will be available through the CES public database.

Employment Situation Technical Notes and Access to Historical Data

The technical notes at the back of the news release will be updated to cover the new concepts introduced. The historical links section of the HTML version of the news release on the BLS Web site will be modified, again providing easy access to historical data for every series presented in the release. These changes will be effective when the data are released in February 2010.

In order to help users prepare for the changes, sample versions of the new Employment Situation News Release Tables will be made available soon. This page will be modified when the samples are available.

 

Last Modified Date: November 6, 2009