The BLS released the October Employment Situation today and it showed a gain of 151,000 jobs (with 159,000 being private sector gains). The unemployment rate *U-3) was unchanged at 9.6% and the U-6 rate was at 17% (17.1% last month). The participation rate dropped slightly to 64.5% (not good) and the employment population rate dropped to 58.3% (also not good). The labor force itself fell by 250,000 (again, very bad) and those not in the labor force, but still want a job increased by 50k last month as well. The much maligned birth/death adjustment added 61,000 jobs last month. Overall, this was another weak report for this point in a "recovery" and although the Establishment Survey shows a gain of about 1.1 million jobs since the low and the Household Survey shows a gain of approximately 2 million jobs since the low, these simply aren't enough to offset the massive losses we experienced during the downturn or to absorb hypothetical new entrants to the labor force.
A couple of interesting data points come from the unadjusted side of the Establishment Survey, as in that data we saw the total nonfarm payrolls increase by roughly a million jobs between September and October (this is in line with normal seasonal adjustment factors however) while the unadjusted Household numbers only increased by 34,000 (and actually decreased by 330,000 in adjusted terms).
The losses reported for August and September were both reduced to only (1000) jobs (from (57,000)) and to (41,000) in September (from (95000). Also, the average workweek rose slightly by .1 of an hour (again not really good enough to spur more job creation).
A h/t to Calculated Risk for the graph of job losses.
Also, check out Bonddad's Blog for more analysis of all things economic.
A couple more interesting notes from this report: 1) the BLS is now going to only apply the birth/death adjustment quarterly starting next year as they will use a new data set that should make the series more accurate, 2) the BLS will also track unemployment durations of up to 5 years (currently they stop at 2 years).