From Sloper Ray……….
There are four elements to a meaningful understanding of employment: 1) Employment, 2) Unemployment, 3) Job Openings, and 4) Jobless (AKA Unemployment Insurance) Claims.
1) Employment
Employment measures the number of people with jobs providing paychecks. Paychecks to employees drive the economy by providing revenues to businesses. The most favored measure is the Non-Farm Payroll (NFP) released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) the first Friday of each month for the preceding month. NFP numbers are commonly known to fluctuate month to month across seasons due to predictable differences in the number of days per month, holidays, and college student movement into and out of the labor force. Because these factors can be predicted the current employment (CE) actual numbers, series CEU0000000001, can be “adjusted” to eliminate these variants to provide more meaningful results, thus the most commonly referenced numbers will be “seasonally adjusted” numbers, series CES0000000001. (However, my personal preference is for actual numbers since no one pays for mortgages, utilities, insurance, or food with “seasonally adjusted paychecks.”)