Most of the news articles on yesterday's employment report noted that the Labor Department's benchmark revision will add 810,000 jobs to the numbers reported in the establishment survey, as of March of 2006. This is an extraordinarily large revision that implies that job growth was considerably more rapid between March of 2005 and March of 2006 than the unrevised data show. However, there is another important implication to this data. If job growth was faster, than productivity growth was slower. The unrevised data show productivity growth of 2.7 percent over the year from the first quarter of 2005 to 2006. If the additional job growth is evenly divided across sectors, productivity growth will be revised down to 2.1 percent for this period. This is a substantial slowing from the 3.4 percent growth rate over the prior 4 years. Of course, readers of CEPR's job bytes know this.
-- Dean Baker
