April job growth: Don’t credit McDonald’s

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Some serious misinformation about the government’s April employment report is floating around the Internet.

McDonald’s Corp. is erroneously getting credit for 62,000 of the 268,000 net new private-sector jobs created last month, or 23% of the total.

Most of the people referring to the McDonald’s figure in Internet forum comments seem to be using it to disparage the hiring total, which was the largest private-sector job gain for any month since February 2006.

McDonald’s did hire 62,000 people last month, but that was on April 19, in a one-day recruiting program nationwide.

Those hires wouldn’t have counted in the U.S. job tally because the government’s monthly survey of employers, which is used to determine net job gains or losses, was done the previous week, said Joe LaVorgna, economist at Deutsche Bank Securities in New York.

The McDonald’s hires should show up in the May jobs data, he said.

The fast-food giant said on April 28 that it took in more than one million applications on April 19. McDonald’s said it had originally planned to hire 50,000 full- and part-time workers but boosted the total to 62,000.

The company didn’t disclose the breakdown of full-time versus part-time jobs.

-- Tom Petruno