Take This Job and Count It!

The political squabble over how to measure the size of the work force.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Monday, July 10, 2006, at 5:48 PM ET

The jobs wars are back. A few years ago, the monthly jobs statistics produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics suddenly became hot. As job growth failed to materialize when the economy began to expand in the fall of 2001, inquiring minds began to wonder whether Bush would be the first president since Hoover to see payroll jobs decline over a full term. Bush partisans, frustrated with the slow pace of job growth as determined by BLS's "establishment" survey, began to argue that another BLS report, its "household" survey, was a more accurate job gauge.

After the 2004 election, partisan fevers subsided, payroll jobs showed steady (if not impressive) growth, and the BLS data sank back into obscurity—until last week, when the jobs fight re-emerged in a different form. Now, the issue is: Who measures job growth better, a vast public bureaucracy or a joint venture between two successful private-sector organizations?