No, the Jobs Report Wasn’t Rigged. Here’s What Happened. -- New York Times

davfor

This article takes a fairly extensive look at the numbers and the methods (complete with a chart that accounts for the misclassifications). It suggests there probably were not "darker forces" at work here. Here are a couple of summarizing excerpts:

The pandemic has complicated the usual methods and models for compiling employment data. But uncertainty has been offset by transparency....economists across the political spectrum say it would be all but impossible to manipulate the jobs numbers undetected.

Erica Groshen, a Cornell University economist who ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics under Mr. Obama, said it was not surprising that a survey intended to measure the ordinary fluctuations in the job market might struggle to capture the nuances of a pandemic-driven shutdown of a vast portion of the economy.

Here is a link to the article:

https://nytimes.com/2020/06/08/business/economy/jobs-report-data.html

msf

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words.

I had observed "Actually, if both April and May numbers were adjusted as suggested (to 19.7% unemployment in April and 16.3% in May) the reduction in unemployment, such as it is, would be 3.4%, far better than the official 1.4% reduction." Perhaps I should have written an additional 962 words?

From the NYTimes article. The solid line is monthly unemployment as reported, the dashed line is after "accounting for misclassification":

Crash

Good to see this. As for me, I was not asserting anything "sinister," beyond the usual reporting, which over many years, has been played with, adjusted, bent, mutilated and folded so that the reported number is not awful and alarming. Not only re: unemployment, but CPI and everything else. But hey, "why would they stop lying? My government has always lied to me. I can deal with that." ---Uncle Lewis Black, "the angriest man in comedy."