The Employment Situation Summary, technically known as the “nonfarm payroll” report, is released by the US Bureau of Labour Statistics on the first Friday of every month. This economic snapshot gives important details regarding job increases and losses as well as the state of the US labour market as a whole. It may also result in stock market fluctuations and have an impact on monetary and fiscal policy choices.
The simplest response is that it would be too expensive and impossible to precisely count farmers.
According to the BLS website, the US government obtains payroll information for its monthly job statistics from administrative records from the Office of Unemployment Insurance. Therefore, employees who are not insured by the government’s unemployment insurance program—which provides compensation to those who have lost their jobs—will not be included in the calculation.
According to Erica Groshen, a former director of the Bureau of Labour Statistics, farm employment is usually family business-oriented or informal work, extremely seasonal, and many of the industry’s employees are not historically covered by UI benefits.
Therefore, Groshen added, getting a precise count would be a difficult challenge for the BLS.
“Doing the seasonal adjustments would be very challenging, and the sample sizes would be very small because it’s really not that large a part of overall employment,” the author claimed. Therefore, it would be exceedingly expensive and most likely of poor quality.
More of those workers have been eligible for unemployment insurance as the farming business consolidates and smaller family-owned farms give way to corporate farming giants with a greater focus on automation, according to Groshen.
“The ones who are in these incorporated large farming companies, such as people who maintain the machinery or do programming or forecasting, those folks are counted,” stated the woman.
However, the agricultural employees who escape the BLS’s report are not wholly unaccounted for.
Due to its connections with farms around the nation, the US Department of Agriculture has historically been tasked with conducting farm labour counts. The USDA conducts a farm labour survey twice a year, in May and November, that includes field workers, livestock workers, managers, and other farm workers. According to the most recent USDA survey, which was published in May, 651,000 agricultural employees were directly hired by US farms and ranches during the week of April 9–15.
According to Groshen, the term “nonfarm payrolls” was first used decades ago, when farmers represented a larger portion of the US economy. However, domestic workers, certain clergy, elected officials, and persons in many other non-traditional professions are also left out of the official jobs report data in addition to farmers.