Justin Fox, Columnist

Jobs Report Revisions Hit Frackers and Retail Workers Hardest

The annual benchmark revisions in payroll employment illustrate a blip in the U.S. economy in 2019.

February 7, 2020 at 5:50 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

So that’s what a fracking gun looks like.
Photographer: Matthew Busch/Bloomberg

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The generally positive news from Friday’s U.S. employment report was tempered a bit by the fact that overall payroll employment was ratcheted down by more than 400,000 jobs because of an annual “benchmark revision” — the biggest such downward revision since the last recession.

It wasn’t tempered that much: The 422,000-job revision for December reduced employment by just 0.3%. It also wasn’t exactly news: The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the size and broad contours of the revision in August. The revised data do allow us, though, to see more clearly what has been happening in a few industries that have been going through changes lately, such as oil and gas, retail, and restaurants. But first, a brief explanation of why these revisions are being made in the first place.