There is a lag in unemployment claims, so there are issues trying to line up the data. Especially since there was such a back log in getting those things processed. Many people filed in March and didn't get approved until May. By the time they show up on the unemployment claims data, they might be re-employed.

The data may be more unreliable due to the pandemic conditions. The Bureau of Labor Statistics talk about them and how they try to adjust for these difficulties. One of these is accounting for business births and deaths. If businesses disappear, they can't be surveyed. So it would appear like job gains are increasing.

In normal time, these two things (business births and deaths) for the most part balance out. One business dies, another starts (or it can be simply modeled as a function of economic conditions). But in these times, lots of businesses are failing and nobody in their right mind is starting up.
But according to the BLS, they changed their modeling to try to correct for this. But who knows if the correction is accurate?


And there could be confusion on how to classify people (employed vs unemployed).
I'm going to just pull quotes from the report about this:

"In May, 8.4 million workers were classified as employed with a job but not at work during the survey
reference week...This likely reflects the impact of
the coronavirus pandemic".
"However, as happened in April and March, some workers who were not at work during the entire
reference week were not classified as unemployed on temporary layoff in May. Rather, they were
classified as employed but absent from work."

"What would the unemployment rate be if these misclassified workers were included among the unemployed?"
"If these workers
were instead considered unemployed on temporary layoff, the number of unemployed people in May (on
a not seasonally adjusted basis) would increase by 4.9 million from 20.5 million to 25.4 million. The
number of people in the labor force would remain at 158.0 million in May (not seasonally adjusted) as
people move from employed to unemployed but stay in the labor force. The resulting unemployment
rate for May would be 16.1 percent (not seasonally adjusted), compared with the official estimate of
13.0 percent "



So there could be adjustments coming in the next months as they get clearer data of what actually happened in May vs what people think is going to happen to their job.


Or...........people could be getting back to work


>I don't like to conspiracy theorize, and I certainly don't
>think they'd be able to just make up these numbers out of thin
>air. But I want some statisticians and economists to dig into
>them and figure out what's going on.
>
>How do we get millions of new unemployment claims every week
>and end up with net positive jobs created? I know they're
>measuring different things, but they ought to be strongly
>correlated. Did they change how they're weighting some of the
>averages? Somebody on TV mentioned that they noted some
>covid-related adjustments. I'm suspicious.
>