Farm Jobs Friday

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Farm employment numbers are historically very hard to track. Partly because they fluctuate a lot from season to season, partly because a large portion of farm workers are undocumented. They're also not included in the monthly job numbers, which means we hardly ever talk about them on Jobs Friday. But today we're bringing you "Farm Jobs Friday" as we zoom in on three big trends in farm employment.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:12.3	It's Jobs Friday, that day each month when we check in on the latest government jobs
0:16.1	report.
0:17.1	Today's report shows that last month the unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5% and at the same time,
0:23.7	the economy added a not so great but not terrible number of jobs, 187,000 jobs.
0:30.9	Some economists are dialing down the recession chatter that soft landing Adrian, I can almost
0:35.9	feel it.
0:36.9	Hopefully, hopefully, but you know before we get too excited here, we're going to put
0:40.5	an asterisk on this Jobs numbers today because the thing that we so often refer to simply
0:46.5	as the Jobs number, it doesn't actually refer to all the jobs.
0:50.9	Technically, it refers to what the number of crunchers call non-farm payrolls.
0:55.5	Yeah, non-farm payrolls as in jobs that don't take place on a farm.
1:00.1	And that's a little weird if you think about it excluding farm jobs because the data suggests
1:04.8	there are at least 2.5 million farm workers in this country.
1:09.2	They're in the fields, planting and picking fruits and vegetables.
1:12.5	They're on cattle farms and poultry plants and fisheries.
1:15.5	So if you're the kind of person who, I don't know, needs food to live, hopefully that describes
1:20.7	you.
1:21.7	Yeah.
1:22.7	Yeah, yeah.
1:23.7	These jobs automatically lots you.
1:24.7	That's right.
	...

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