Last week (February 6, 2015), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its latest – Employment Situation Summary – which suggested that “Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 257,000 in January, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 5.7 percent”. That is a relatively strong result and job gains were reported across all the major private sectors. Public employment continued to fall. The data has already been analysed to death within the media so I wanted to concentrate on some comparisons with other nations, which are quite interesting. Further, the BLS released the related – Job Openings and Labor Turnover – dataset yesterday (February 10, 2015), which allows us to dig deeper into the raw aggregate numbers to make better assessments of what is going on.