An alternative look at monthly job losses

For any conspiracy theorists out there who think the government intentionally under-reports job loss and unemployment statistics, I have decided to post job loss numbers from a non-governmental source as a follow-up to yesterday's post on the subject.

The graph below shows the job gain/loss estimates from the ADP National Employment Report. Note that although an individual month's numbers can be quite different between Automatic Data Processing and the U.S. Department of Labor, the overall trend has been roughly the same.

The numbers are in thousands. As before, this graph shows new job losses per month, not cumulative job losses: