I use "massages" to cover two factors. First, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has redefined the way it measures unemployment and employment several times over t

I use "massages" to cover two factors. First, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has redefined the way it measures unemployment and employment several times over the decades. In addition, there are a range of seasonal adjustments and other possible variations in the surveys and number crunching that are more difficult to understand and less well documented. See for example this discussion of discrepancies between the BLS unemployment rate and the Gallup Poll unemployment rate (since 2010): http://unemploymentdata.com/unemployment/is-the-government-fudging-unemployment-numbers/ http://unemploymentdata.com/unemployment/is-the-government-f... It is difficult to know if in practice the household surveys are done the same way each time and also what seasonal and "one-time" adjustments may be occurring either during the first measurement or subsequent corrections. As the discrepancies between the BLS and Gallup numbers indicate, there is evidence of shorter term massaging not captured in the major redefinitions, such as excluding "discouraged workers" who want a job but supposedly have not looked for one recently, in the 1994 revisions to the unemployment measures.