Crucial monthly report veiled in secrecy, ritual

By David Finkel
The Washington Post

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WASHINGTON — There is the matter of the trash. By 8:30 a.m. EST, local time, it will need to be emptied.

There is the matter of the man with the watch. The watch is set to U.S. Naval Observatory time, and by 8:29, the man will be watching it tick, tick, tick until he shouts, "It is 8:30."

And there is the matter of the verb. By 8:30:01, the world will learn whether the winner of days of discussions behind the locked doors of the U.S. Division of Labor Force Statistics is "declined," "rose," "edged" or "remained the same."

This is the first Friday of the month, so the latest national employment figures are released by the Labor Department. At 8:30 a.m., the nation finds out how many jobs and unemployed workers it had in March.

There is a ritual leading up to the report's release, carried out in such secrecy that for four days there has been no trash pickup at the office where the employment report is prepared. "We encourage people to take the smelly trash to the pantry," Tom Nardone, chief of the 24-person office, but other than that, nothing gets out of the fourth-floor office.

The reason for the secrecy is the importance of the report, which has profound political and financial consequences. "There's money that's made or lost on the movement of these numbers," Nardone said. "That's one reason. The other is we strive to have a level playing field" in which everyone, except a few dozen people, learns the numbers at the same time.

To that end, workers for the Census Bureau began gathering employment data in mid-March as part of the monthly survey of 60,000 U.S. households, the results of which will translate into the unemployment rate. About the same time, Nardone said, payroll data from 400,000 businesses was being compiled to produce a second essential statistic, the number of nonfarm jobs. Both are highlighted in the first sentence of the report, which, in tone if not content, sounded much like the previous report: "Nonfarm employment was little changed in February, and the unemployment rate remained at 5.6 percent."

Neutral as such a sentence may seem, what to say in it was at the heart of meeting after meeting as the March figures were prepared for release.

The process began full-time Monday morning, when the doors were locked, two big trash bins were wheeled in and data from the household survey began streaming in from Census. One person was assigned to write a draft summary of the household data, another was assigned to write about the payroll data; a third was assigned to draft the statement to be made by Nardone's boss, Kathleen Utgoff, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
 
Tuesday, Nardone, the three writers and two supervisors began hammering out the language of those first sentences. "Verbs," he said, "are the big part." What is an acceptable verb? "Declined," Nardone said. "Rose. Grew." What about dropped? "We've used dropped," he said. Shed? "Shed we use." Bled? "No." Plunged? "No." Nose-dived? "No. The thing we're trying to avoid is being judgmental. ... If you use nose-dived, or bled, or soared, or skyrocketed, then you're not just providing direction, there's some judgment of the direction."

Wednesday, Nardone convened a meeting to get down to the nitty-gritty of the opening lines. "We've never come to blows," he said, "but, you know, voices can be raised."

Thursday brought more meetings. Final revisions were made and a preview of the report was sent to President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, the only people outside a select few authorized to see the figures before release. The council, in turn, prepared a summary that is given late Thursday to Bush, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary John Snow.

The report becomes available Friday at 8 a.m. to key Cabinet members and reporters sequestered until 8:30 in a monitored and locked room.

After that, it's time for Nardone's next task: "Friday at 8:35," he said, "that's when I'm thinking about emptying those trash cans."

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