This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Rick Henderson, Managing Editor of Carolina Journal.

RALEIGH — The past few weeks, I — along with my John Locke Foundation colleagues Don Carrington and Terry Stoops — have been poring over state employment reports, attempting to verify the newfound concern over alleged job losses in the public sector.

We’re hearing wildly divergent accounts of a decimated government work force, with selfless public servants being victimized by a heartless Republican majority in the General Assembly. The bad news has been delivered by Gov. Bev Perdue, who in late April warned that the state was “about to see the largest public layoff in North Carolina and maybe in American history” if the budget proposed by the GOP became law.

When it became clear that the new conservative legislative leaders were going to deliver what they promised — ending the temporary tax increases that Perdue insisted on in 2009 and passing a budget that spent less in the next two fiscal years than the last two — the Left became hysterical.

Perdue estimated a loss of 30,000 public-sector jobs, 18,000 of them in education, under Republican spending plans. (She neglected to mention at the time that her initial budget plan included 10,000 government layoffs.) House Minority Leader Joe Hackney, D-Orange, made similar claims about cuts in education jobs. Left-leaning groups were quick to pile on, including the N.C. Budget & Tax Center, which forecast a loss of nearly 20,000 government jobs from the General Assembly’s current budget.

These dire projections haven’t come to pass, at least based on monthly reports from the state Employment Security Commission cited by Perdue, Hackney, and their liberal allies. In seasonally adjusted terms (a measure I’ll return to later), ESC said state and local governments lost 10,800 jobs in July. (The budget became law July 1.) But employment rebounded in August, as 14,400 state and local jobs were added that month. So state and local government jobs actually went up by 3,600 since GOP austerity measures took effect. (ESC has not separated education jobs from other government positions in those months.)

That’s not the whole story. For one thing, the school year doesn’t ramp up fully until September, so the September report may show even more jobs restored.

The concern about lost government jobs is a completely new phenomenon. It wasn’t an issue before Republicans took over the General Assembly in November, even though the ESC says public employment endured even more wrenching shifts in employment in previous years.

Over the past three Julys, government employment in North Carolina (seasonally adjusted) has plummeted — by 21,300 in 2009, 27,300 in 2010, and 11,000 this year. But when the state experienced even greater public-sector job losses over the previous two years, where was the outcry from Perdue and Hackney? Oh, right. They were in charge back then.

Finally, there’s a big problem with the way ESC presents its monthly employment reports. Its reliance on seasonally adjusted job totals is misleading, if not deceptive. Seasonal adjustment is a guess. For instance, government number crunchers expect department stores to add jobs during the Christmas shopping season; restaurants and retail shops do the same at the beach during the summer. If more (or fewer) jobs are added than their computer models anticipate, then the seasonally adjusted job count will go up or down. The seasonally adjusted job number is not a count of people who actually show up for work and get paychecks. It’s a guess.

But ESC treats those figures as gospel, and elected officials (along with some in the media and the advocacy community) are more than happy to entertain the fiction. A more honest way to address these numbers would be to consider only the not-seasonally adjusted (aka unadjusted) counts. Those come from surveys of real businesses and government agencies, and aren’t run through some highfalutin seasonal estimating program. The employment agencies in Virginia and South Carolina report unadjusted job numbers, and ours should, too.

Looking at unadjusted data over the past decade, you’ll see a big drop in government jobs every July when schools are out — more than 30 percent on average over that period — and then a major rebound in September when schools reopen. In fact, in every year since 2000, the number of government jobs has been higher in December than it was in June.

We may see some reductions in the government work force during the final months of this year. School districts, colleges, and universities may trim positions in a lean fiscal climate.

Universities and community colleges also have cut back “adjunct faculty” and other part-time instructors. Nearly all of these instructors have full-time jobs in other lines of work and lead a class or two a semester. This puts a little extra money in their pockets and lets full-time faculty teach fewer classes.

To government number crunchers, however, each adjunct faculty position is a job, and many of these may be “lost” even though the people who once held them remain fully employed at their regular jobs.

ESC could cool some of the hotter rhetoric about its employment reports — and serve the public much more effectively — by highlighting the unadjusted job numbers in its monthly press releases. Moreover, it should emphasize that all its reports are estimates that often are revised, sometimes substantially.

The bigger question is why liberal politicians and advocacy groups are fixated on government workers while treating private-sector employees as an afterthought. The size of the public-sector work force is irrelevant so long as essential services are being delivered effectively. And until private employment bounces back, there will be even less tax revenue available to fill government coffers.