The BLS has 131,200 for January and 137,000 for June 2015 for the area. Doesn’t seem like a bad loss to me. In fact, 137,000 is the highest month in history. July is expected, but not yet validated, to eclipse that record.
AEI seems to be pulling seasonally adjusted numbers which don’t appear to even be available from BLS. I don’t know what sort of formula the St. Louis Fed (their secondary source) is applying to account for seasonality, but it’s not in the BLS data as far as I can tell. While they have an option for adjusting for seasonality, that is only at a very high grain (i.e. Total Non-Farm Labor). If the St. Louis Fed author is applying that to an individual industry, they’re doing it wrong. Did AEI choose this source instead of straight from the horse’s mouth, simply because it gave them what they were looking for?
Hell, I’ll even give instructions for how to get the actual data, so you don’t have to rely on my word.
Go to: http://www.bls.gov/data/#employment
Under the “Employment” category, “Monthly” sub category, “Employment, Hours, and Earnings - State and Metro Area” sub sub category, click on “Multi-Screen Data Search”.
Select “Not Seasonally Adjusted” and click “Next form”
Select “01 All Employees, in Thousands” and click “Next form”
Select “53 Washington” and click “Next form”
Select “42660 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA” and click “Next form”
Select “70 Leisure and Hospitality” and click “Next form”
Select “70722000 Food Services and Drinking Places” and click “Next form”
Click “Retrieve data” and look for yourself.
Note: Once you are at the link, it’s not nearly as complicated as the instructions might make it appear. You can also use the “One-Screen Data Search” although that usually has issues with various browsers.
