3:16 p.m. ET, October 6, 2023
What about all the striking workers?
More than 450,000 workers, from actors to auto workers, have participated in 312 strikes across the United States this year, according to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker.
Are all of these workers missing from the U.S. government’s monthly jobs reports?
The report, prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the result of two different surveys.
A sample of employers is asked to indicate how many employees they have employed based on their payroll records for the pay period that includes the 12th of the month. This survey data is used to determine how many people were hired or fired in a given month.
“If the striking workers earned wages for any part of the reference period, even for an hour, they are counted as employed,” Cody Parkinson, an economist at BLS, told CNN. “Striking workers are included in the first monthly estimate as a deduction from employment levels if they do not work in the reference wage period. They won’t be added back until they return to work.”
This means that in the September labor market report, striking members of the United Auto Workers are counted as employed since the strike began on September 15, the reporting week. However, if the strike continues through the end of next week, they will not be counted as employed in next month’s October jobs report unless they are on another employer’s payroll. In contrast, the impact of the SAG-AFTRA strike, which began in July, showed up in some data included in the September jobs report.
“Employment in the motion picture and sound recording industry continued to trend downward (-7,000) and has declined by 45,000 since May, reflecting the impact of labor disputes,” the BLS noted in the September jobs report.
In the case of the recently concluded Writers Guild of America strike, many of the union members were contract workers or freelancers. So you can’t see the impact of strikes just from industry hiring data, which comes from payroll data.
However, there is another survey used to create the monthly jobs report that asks individuals whether they worked in a given week. Data from this survey is used to calculate the unemployment rate. Since the survey covers almost all types of labor arrangements, striking contractors and freelancers would impact the data.
The BLS classifies someone as unemployed “if they have not worked but have been available for work and have actively looked for work in the past four weeks.”
If the answer to this question is no, then they are not considered part of the labor force, even if they belong to a striking union.
If someone was on strike but earned money in other ways during the reference period, such as driving for Uber, they were counted as employed.
Finally, “an employee who was on strike and absent from work throughout the reference period would be counted as employed but not at work due to a labor dispute,” Parkinson said.
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