President Ronald Reagan “had a month of job creation of 1 million.”

— George Will on Sunday during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,”

President Ronald Reagan“had a month of job creation of 1 million.”— George Will on Sunday during an appearance on“Fox News Sunday”

George Will

Disappointing job numbers — 126,000 added jobs in March — put the White House on the defensive and energized President Barack Obama’s critics. Conservative columnist George Will noted how poorly Obama stacks up against Republican icon Ronald Reagan.

“During the Reagan recovery, there were 23 months of job creation over 300,000,” Will said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Reagan had a month of job creation of 1 million, and this was at a time when there were 75 million fewer

PolitiFact

Americans.”

Will is correct that across Reagan’s two terms as president, there were 23 months when the economy added over 300,000 jobs (the average monthly gain was about 250,000 jobs).

But the focus of this factcheck is Will’s claim that Reagan oversaw a month when employment shot up by 1 million. Dave Weigel of Bloomberg Politics questioned Will’s claim, and we thought it was worth examining.

There can be only one month that Will had in mind. It is September 1983.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employer data showed 1.1 million more people getting paychecks in September than in August. This would be extraordinary except for one thing — on Aug. 7, 1983, about 675,000 telephone workers went on strike. At the end of the month, they approved a contract and went back to work. In the interim, the Labor Department gathered its payroll data — and, essentially, documented the effect of the strike.

“No doubt the striking workers returning to their jobs would have created a big bump in employment,” said Doug Rossinow, a historian at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minn., and author of “The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s.”

Put simply, the strike jangled the monthly job counts on both ends. It drove down the tally for August and pumped it up in September (and drove it back down for October). The government’s September 1983 jobs report explicitly tied the 1.1 million spike to the labor dispute.

“Nonagricultural payroll employment rose by 735,000 in September,” the report said. “About 675,000 of this increase, however, represented the return of employees to payrolls following settlement of strikes, chiefly that of communications workers.”

Newspapers were careful not to read too much into the big number. The New York Times wrote that the recovery was gaining ground with a rise of “nearly 400,000, in the overall number of people employed.”

The Labor Department did not count the striking workers as employed in August because they weren’t drawing a paycheck. But the jobs they had on Aug. 6, 1983, were waiting for them when they settled at the end of the month.

The claim that 1.1 million new jobs were added in a single month has been debunked before, as recently as January.

Our ruling: Will said Reagan created 1 million jobs in one month.

The reality is the jobs created by Reagan in 1983 were the result of a counting anomaly that started with a strike of telephone workers. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics rightly discounted the spike when it first reported it in 1983, as did news reports. Will should have, too. We rate the claim Pants On Fire. including a provision they requested that there be no Section 8 apartments. I suppose that makes sense, Section 8 people would probably have a hard time affording Whole Foods.

Jeff Fuqua, principal partner of the company bearing his name, said he has eyed this property for years, but the recession got in the way. So did the layer of rock in the ground. (Hello dynamite!)

Fuqua has been involved in dozens of developments throughout metro Atlanta, including 12 now in the works. He likes to think he has been fair when residents had to get moved out. Trailers make things tricky, he admits. There’s the ownership of units and the problems with moving older structures and the fuzzy titles and so on. He said his company will buy people’s trailers or move them.

“We’re very confident we’re going well above the norm” in what’s legally required to help those who must leave, he said, adding that the proverbial “handful of vocal people” are behind much of the ruckus.

Once the deal is closed — it could be a few weeks — residents will have two months to pack up their trailers and hardluck stories and get moving. Maybe they’ll find better luck down the road.

Dominique Jackson, Model