Jobs Data Shows Micro-Employer Pain
Aug 23rd, 2009 | By Dawn Rivers Baker | Category: ResearchIt is often quite difficult to figure out how the nation’s small businesses are doing at any given moment in time. You can talk to a few small business owners to ask them but that only gets you anecdotal evidence. You might turn to the added formality of the National Federation of Independent Business’s monthly Survey of Small Business Optimism. So, while the NFIB does a very good job of measuring the well-being of those small firms that have the greatest economic impact, it doesn’t provide a wholly accurate answer to the question, “How are our small firms doing?”
Among the public and private sources of still more objective data, there is still the problem of data lag. However, one particularly useful and fairly timely bit of data is the quarter business employment dynamic data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The recently released fourth quarter 2008 numbers show that microbusiness employers have been holding pretty steady at 15-16% share of both job gains and losses over the last three years. In addition, the smallest firms (with fewer than 50 employees) and the largest (with over 1,000 employees) accounted for two-thirds of the 1.8 million jobs lost that quarter. With the next two releases, we will begin to get a feel for what is going on with small firms during the first half of 2009, when many economists have said the economy bottomed out and began turning the corner.
