The Census, the school year, and other weird things in Friday's jobs report

I got two items that you should be aware of when the US jobs report for August drops on Friday.

The first is the effect of seasonal adjustments, which runs in a couple of different directions. The first is in overall private sector job changes, which assumes there will be some kind of seasonal layoff in August. The second is in schools, as shown in public school employment at the state and local levels, which assumes a lot of people starting work every August.

August 2019, Seasonally adjusted vs raw change
Private sector
Raw change +75,000
Seasonally-adjusted +157,000

State government - education
Raw change +77,100
Seasonally-adjusted +11,700

Local government - education
Raw change +336,700
Seasonally-adjusted +14,100

The education numbers are especially going to be worth looking at, given how odd things have been with both K-12 and universities in their plans to restart school.

The other quirk that's going to be in this report relates to the Census, and not just because of the Trump Administration's questionable moves that will result in infomation-gathering being ended a month earlier than normal.

The Census has started to release information on the number of people hired for the decennial project, and a lot of them were hired between mid-July (when the July survey for the jobs report was taken) and mid-August (when the August survey was taken).

Census workers
Week of July survey 50,404
Week of August survey 287,149
CHANGE +236,745

Given that there is little seasonal adjustment for non-postal Federal employment, that means job growth will be up 230,000 because of the Census alone. And you can bet TrumpWorld won't mention that reality when they give their spin on the big jobs report on Friday.

Keep both these items in the back of your mind as Friday approaches.