The gap between the employment out there and what gets reported in the Census is a lot higher when you factor in jobs not covered by the ES202 system, both wage/salary and "self-employed" proprietors.  (The 6% upward adjustment ABAG reports to you seems low, BEA figures would indicate about a 20% adjustment needed.)   Non-response could be the biggest factor - I imagine the Census Bureau would have a hard time "imputing" number of workers if a household ignores all the work-related questions on the long form.


TO: CTPP-News listserv
FR: Chuck Purvis
RE: Reconciling Total Employment and Workers-at-Work

One of the many data issues relevant to the release of the county-to-county total worker flow data is the reconciliation of independent estimates of employment (jobs) with the Census 2000 workers-at-work data. My executive director saw a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about the mismatch between census data and employment and labor force data, and was concerned if this is an issue in our region. My short answer to my ED was, no, the data problems faced in New York and Los Angeles are not that serious in the Bay Area. I also provided him the "long answer" which may prove useful to other metro areas interested in reconciling different data sets.

The bottom line is that estimates of TOTAL EMPLOYMENT (i.e., jobs at area of work) SHOULD BE about 7 to 9 percent HIGHER than Census 2000 estimates of workers-at-work (i.e., workers at area of work). It is important to understand that there are important definitional differences between total employment and decennial census-based workers-at-work.

Our indepedent estimate of total employment, year 2000, is 3,753,700 total jobs; Census 2000 data on workers-at-work is 3,396,800. This shows that our total employment, unadjusted, is 10.5 percent higher than our census-based workers-at-work. This is a really big difference! AFTER ADJUSTMENTS, the difference between our total employment (adjusted) and census-based workers-at-work is 1.1 percent.

There are three main ADJUSTMENTS that are needed to make TOTAL EMPLOYMENT data comparable to census workers-at-work data:
1. Seasonal fluctuations in employment adjustments;
2. Multiple jobholding adjustments; and
3. Weekly absenteeism adjustments.

Sam Granato
Ohio DOT, Office of Technical Services
1980 W. Broad Street, Columbus, OH  43223
Phone:  614-644-6796, Fax:  614-752-8646
"It is a fine line between insight and idiocy."  Greg Lebedev