ELLERY, Neb. — The U.S. economy added 29,000 jobs in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Oct. 2, well below the roughly 90,000 that economists had expected. The unemployment rate rose to 4.2 percent.
The Ellery Area Chamber of Commerce, which has 212 members and one shared conference room with a broken projector, said Saturday that the figure was “exactly what our members asked for.”
“Nobody in this county is unemployed by accident,” said Brenda Kuhnert, 61, the chamber’s president, who was reading from a laminated card at the chamber’s monthly breakfast at a pancake house in Ellery. “You have to want to be employed, and then you have to say no to the offer, which our members have done with real conviction. That is how we got our confidence back.”
Kuhnert said the chamber had surveyed its members in September and found that 41 of them had declined a position at least once, and that 17 had declined the same position twice, which she described as “a commitment.” The chamber counted each refusal as one new job created, and multiplied the total by a factor it called “the local adjustment.” The factor was 4.3, which the chamber said was “not a made-up number, it is the number we use.”
The bureau’s figure is based on payroll records from employers and does not include refusals. Kuhnert said that was “a difference in methodology,” adding that the chamber’s count and the government’s count were both 29,000 “by two different roads that meet at the same place.”
By the chamber’s own ledger, the 17 members who declined a position twice were responsible for 9,000 of the new jobs, leaving 20,000 to be credited to the 24 members who declined only once. Kuhnert said that was “a fair way to distribute the credit,” and that anyone who had been offered a job and not taken it was welcome to attend the next breakfast and “prove otherwise.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the chamber’s reasoning was sound. He spoke by phone from a hockey rink. “If the job wanted you, it would have found you,” Brickhouse said. “It’s just common sense. We ran the numbers, and the numbers agreed with me.”
Ron Gilchrist, senior spokesperson for the Department of Agricultural Common Sense, was asked whether the federal government had a view on the chamber’s count. Gilchrist said the department “does not track employment,” and that questions about hiring should be directed to “the people who grow the things.” He declined to comment further.
Asked whether a 4.2 percent unemployment rate meant that about one in 24 people in the local labor force were looking for work, Kuhnert said it did not, because “those people are looking at their phones, which is a different kind of looking.” She said the chamber had offered several of them a position on the spot and that all of them had declined, which she described as “the free market in action.”
The chamber closed its breakfast at 9:40 a.m. with a motion to form a committee on the committee that will study the 29,000. The committee has no members, but the chamber has already applied for a grant to fund it.