Established in 1915, Monthly Labor Review is the principal journal of fact, analysis, and research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an agency within the U.S. Department of Labor.

Each month, economists, statisticians, and experts from the Bureau join with private sector professionals and State and local government specialists to provide a wealth of research in a wide variety of fields—the labor force, the economy, employment, inflation, productivity, occupational injuries and illnesses, wages, prices, and many more.

The May Review
Our lead article this month assesses the sources and quality of international statistics on hours worked. As with any effort at international comparison, much work has to be done to standardize concepts, measures, and sources as much as possible for the comparisons to be meaningful.

As the author Susan E. Fleck notes, “Measuring and comparing how many hours people spend at work across countries is not an exact science, despite recent improvements in methodology and data coverage.”

But, in an era of ever-increasing global markets and trade, it is an invaluable exercise to undertake. The article describes and contrasts data for 13 developed economies as far back as 1980.

2008 was not a good year overall for employment trends in the U.S. labor market. As Katherine Klemmer discusses in her article, job openings and hires both declined in 2008. This downward trend, coupled with an upward trend in layoffs and discharges, should not be surprising in light of the rise in unemployment and decline in employment that have characterized the recession which began at the end of 2007. The author summarizes developments in openings and hires for the nation as a whole, for regions, and by industry.

The Bureau’s Business Employment Dynamics (BED) program has become an increasingly watched data source for quarterly insight on the U.S. economy. Three BLS economists—Akbar Sadeghi, James R. Spletzer, and David M. Talan—present new time series from the BED program of annual gross job gains and gross job losses. Their article provides a detailed explanation of how these new series have been created and the unique value added by their availability. They present comparisons of the new series with the quarterly BED statistics and with similar statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.

There has been a great deal of research and discussion about how workplace injuries and illnesses are measured and whether the current program conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collects and tabulates employer reports, is fully accurate. Nicole Nestoriak and Brooks Pierce describe a recent study that compared case records from the BLS program with information from Workers’ Compensation claims databases. They present some additional findings by analyzing a subset of the data used in the recent study.

Their goal is to extend the aggregate results reported by the other authors in order to shed light on the types of cases the BLS survey may undercount.

Download Monthly Labor Review, May 2009

PDF format, 1.7MB, 143Pages.

Volume 132, Number 5
May 2009
International comparisons of hours worked: an assessment of the statistics 3
A study of 13 countries reveals inherent biases in data sources used to measure hours worked; thus, these data remain useful for broad, but not detailed, comparisons
Susan E. Fleck

Job openings and hires decline in 2008 32
Downward trends in job openings, hires, and quits, and upward trends in layoffs and discharges characterize labor demand during 2008
Katherine Klemmer

Business employment dynamics: annual tabulations 45
Annual data, released for the first time, allow for comparisons between BED statistics and statistics from other agencies
Akbar Sadeghi, James R. Spletzer, and David M. Talan

Comparing Workers’ Compensation claims with establishments’ responses to the SOII 57
Comparing elements of the WC database with data from the SOII is a useful way to determine which types of injuries and illnesses the SOII is most likely to undercount
Nicole Nestoriak and Brooks Pierce

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International comparisons of hours worked: an assessment of the statistics

A study of 13 countries reveals that measures of hours worked based on administrative sources are relatively low while measures based on establishment and labor force surveys are relatively high; thus, although ever improving, these measures cannot yet be taken at face value and are useful only for broad comparisons ....

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