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More recent employment data indicates Northeast Ohio has been gaining jobs, not losing them.

(Lonnie Timmons III, The Plain Dealer)

News accounts from last year and earlier this year purporting to show drastic job losses in Greater Cleveland had many people

.

The economy may not have been booming, but it certainly wasn't imploding, as front-page headlines in The Plain Dealer and on cleveland.com suggested. Yet, the employment estimates provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and cited in the paper and online showed large year-over-year decreases in total jobs for several months in a row. We were on a losing streak, so the story went.

Only we weren't. It now appears the Cleveland metropolitan area actually was gaining jobs.

That's the danger of making assumptions or drawing conclusions based on the estimated year-over-year Current Employment Statistics that are reported monthly by BLS and are derived from a relatively small sample of employers in each metropolitan statistical area. The margin of error is so broad the numbers can be hugely misleading.

Greater Cleveland learned this lesson the hard way as it endured month after month of bad publicity stemming from CES employment reports that are now being proved wrong.

For example, the CES estimated the over-the-year net change in May 2013 in the Cleveland metropolitan statistical area as a decrease of 5,100 jobs, representing the difference between 1,025,700 total jobs for May 2012 and 1,020,600 total jobs in May 2013.

But when the far more reliable Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages came out several months later, it showed that total employment in the Cleveland area in May 2013 was actually up by 9,004 jobs over the same month of the previous year.

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And in June 2013, the initial CES estimate showed a net decline of 6,900 jobs, only to have the QCEW report later show a net boost of 8,963

in the Cleveland metropolitan statistical area, which includes Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Medina and Lorain counties

.

Tom Waltermire, chief executive officer of the regional economic development organization Team NEO, said he expects future QCEW numbers will also discredit the losses previously reported in the second half of 2013.

Politicians, corporations,

the media and economic development groups should therefore be careful and skeptical in

using

CES metro-level

job estimates until

more reliable data emerge

several months later.

Why is the QCEW more reliable? Simple: It is based on reporting from most employers in the area, not estimates derived from a small sampling of employers. The drawback? The QCEW numbers take much longer to report.

The BLS numbers are not intentionally misleading. On a statewide and nationwide basis, they tend to present a pretty accurate rapid snapshot of job trends. But the small sample size for metro areas -- the identities of the actual companies sampled are secret but changes are made on an annual basis -- means the numbers can skew in a big way both up, and down. In early 2011, the CES numbers gave the Cleveland area credit for much bigger job gains than were actually occurring.

But even when dealing with reliable numbers, one should be careful drawing conclusions from successive net declines in year-over-year monthly totals because there are many moving parts to consider, said Chris Manning, BLS division chief for Current Employment Statistics at the state and metro level. Such net declines shouldn't be added up as accumulating losses from one month to the next.

It's hard to say how Cleveland's reputation has suffered from the misleading jobs reports of recent months. One regional bank president interpreted the steady drumbeat of bad news as fresh job losses each month, Waltermire said, which even if the numbers were accurate, would not have been the case.

And

Ned Hill, dean of the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, points to a website where the CES estimates are used to rank metropolitan areas. That website, garnereconomics.com , includes Greater Cleveland on a list of areas where job growth turned to job losses in 2013.

That's not good. Cleveland faces enough disparaging stereotypes and misperceptions. It should not have to do battle with a job-shedding image that just isn't true.