cases, and the rest through home visits. In sum, they try to contact 60,000 households, asking a list of questions and recording the responses. Some questions allow for unambiguous answers, but others less so. For instance, the range for part-time work falls between one hour and 34 hours a week. So, if an out-of-work accountant tells a census worker, "I got one baby-sitting job this week just to cover my kid's bus fare, but I haven't been able to find anything else," that could be recorded as being employed part-time. Those who study this data each month know all of that and understand sampling variability. Sampling variability doesn't mean then numbers are "cooked". It just means we have to consult the accompanying table of standard errors to see the confidence intervals. Totally transparent. We can also argue about the internationally accepted labour force framework definitions which come via the ILO labour statistics guidelines that national statistical agencies agree to use for comparability reasons. For example, the transition from unemployment to employment being 1 hour of paid work in the survey week, certainly biases the unthinking user of the data to believing things are better than they are, if the hours distribution is skewing towards 1 hour per week away from full-time work. That is why we look deeper to see what is happening with the distribution of hours worked and the rate of underemployment. Welch thinks he is on a winner when he says: ... the BLS's own "Handbook of