Suspicions among white-collar professionals that the recovery is an illusion, or at least has left them behind, are validated by official government data buried in the monthly employment reports, based on household surveys, which few bother to actually read.
Even more worrisome is the continuation of a decade-long decline in the number of self-employed, a category which includes many of these same professionals.
While even the seasonally-adjusted employment data show an uptick in five of the six unemployment measures (Table A-15 of the January 2015 jobs report, available at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm), the unadjusted numbers in the same table show a measurable increase in unemployment.
However, that is not news to the white-collar workforce which has not fully recovered and which may never recover. Remember that the official data, if anything, paints a rosier picture than reality, because it is based on methodologies which strain to overstate employment and understate unemployment.
First, the reported data shows a rise in unemployment among the “management, professional and related occupations” in January 2015 from December 2014 by 173,000, while reported employment in the sector is up 479,000. The numbers, not adjusted for seasonality, actually support an increase in the sector’s reported unemployment rate to 2.9%. In fact, reported unemployment among the “professional and related occupations”(1) and “management, business and financial operations” sectors is nearly double what it was in December 2007.