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&lt;p&gt;In case you missed it, last Friday&#39;s jobs number was underwhelming. The economy added just 54,000 jobs in May&amp;mdash;around a third of what economists had predicted--while the headline unemployment rate ticked up to 9.1 percent.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cue a week of back and forth on the state of the economy that somehow missed any discussion of the following salient points:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&amp;bull; Local governments cut 28,000 jobs over the month, continuing a trend of downsizing in the public sector. While certainly not encouraging for the economy, these positions tend to be trailing indicators due to government budgeting processes&amp;mdash;especially at the state and local levels, where deficits are verboten. &lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&amp;bull; Temp hiring has fallen off a cliff. In March, private businesses hired 30,000 temporary workers. In April and May, they shed 3,000 of them. That has the potential to be a really bad sign, as temp hiring is often seen as a forerunner to permanent hiring. &lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it could be that the end of the school year is suppressing demand for temps, with interns picking up the slack for less cost. And, according to a BLS spokesperson, interns aren&amp;rsquo;t necessarily counted in the overall employment numbers:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;An individual must be engaged in work for pay or profit to be counted as employed.  Internships--as I understand the term--are unpaid work experience or training opportunities.  Unpaid work is not counted as employment except in special instances of family members working in the family-owned business or farm without formal pay.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;If an individual has a for-pay job, their industry classification is based on the primary business activity of their employer, regardless of their expected employment duration with that employer.   For example, a college student working a for-pay summer job at a law firm would be classified in Legal Services, even though the job will only last a few months.  There is no way to identify such temporary jobs in our monthly survey data.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: if interns are being paid, they&#39;ll likely be getting counted somewhere in the report, but not as temps. If they&#39;re not being paid, they won&#39;t be counted at all. &lt;em&gt;Claro?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not that fully explains the seeming stagnation of the temp market is open to question. But it seems to reasonable to assume that it&#39;s having &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; effect&amp;mdash;and while it may be helping the companies involved to save a little on payroll, it&#39;s likely not doing much to stimulate the anemic demand levels that so many firms are citing as barriers to their willingness to hire.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;--Phil Stott, Vault.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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