The District Sentinel Discontent Index increased by 1.78 points in November to 110.83, up from a revised 109.06 in October.
The increase, however, was driven by a momentary burst in strike activity caused by the response in the US to the Ebola epidemic, indicating the rise will only be temporary. The measure continued to fall on a year-over-year basis–by 7.64 points, from 118.47 in November 2013–reinforcing claims that the economy is, generally, improving.
Two out of three components of the index decreased slightly, also exemplifying wider economic betterment since the Great Recession.
Consumer Discontent and Housing Discontent dropped respectively by roughly 0.25 and 0.57–to 33.18 and 44.85 in November, from 33.44 and 45.43 in October. Drops in both measures were driven by increases in average weekly earnings for non-supervisory workers. The greater decrease in Housing Discontent was caused by the decline in the rate of seriously delinquent FHA-backed mortgages, to 6.76 from 6.91 in October.
Labor Discontent, however, was up on a monthly increase by a whopping 2.6 to 32.8—the highest it has been since May 2014. Steady declines in the measure driven by a constant picking up of labor market slack were were reversed in November by a sharp uptick in “major work stoppages” documented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The number of workers on strike in November shot up to 21,800 due to a one-day walkout by at least 19,000 nurses working for Kaiser Permanente hospitals in California and Washington, DC. The healthcare workers were protesting what they said were unsafe working conditions when being ordered to administer treatment to Ebola patients.
There had not been more than a few thousand workers on strike in any given month since May 2013, when another one-day walkout by California healthcare employees drove the number of workers involved in “major work stoppages” to 24,300.
Revisions to data slightly changed the Discontent Index in September and October respectively to 110.77 and 109.06. The new data brought the measurement down in October from 110.98, and up in November from 108.9.
Between its January 2004 baseline (DI=99.9, all three sub-indexes=33.3) and its public launch in late 2014, the Discontent Index peaked at 144.35 in Aug. 2011 – one month before the Occupy Wall Street movement started. Its record low was 87.65 in Dec. 2006 – when unemployment reached a post-tech bubble recession low of 4.4 percent.
Find out more about the Discontent Index and its components and inputs here.
