The Wall Street Journal reported today (page A18) that the U.S. Department of Labor has revised job figures for the period between March, 2005 and March, 2006. New jobs were undercounted, and Labor has added 810,000 more new jobs to the count to bring the three year total to 6.6 million new jobs. The Journal is calling this a "...whoops, we found a whole lot of jobs we missed."
The Journal believes that the Labor Department continues to undercount small business and self-employed entrepreneur jobs creation, an issue I have been writing about for years. The Census Bureau conducts two regular surveys. The Establishment Survey measure payroll jobs, and the Household Survey counts how many people are employed in a household. The problem is that Labor, along with doom and gloom analysts, tend to focus on the Establishment Survey, where jobs growth has been anemic--because the nature of business is changing.
The Establishment Survey has no way of counting self-employed businesspeople and entrepreneurs because these kinds of businesses have little or no payroll. And small businesses are moving more and more towards outsourcing many kinds of work that used to be done in house.
Bottom line: Communities need affordable broadband because the small businesses and entrepreneurs most likely to create new jobs have to have it to survive and grow.