After the disappointing August job report came out last month, several analysts said they just didn't believe the numbers could have been so low. At worst, they said, new job creation would return to the 200,000 or more a month that the bureau's statisticians had said the economy grew in the previous half year. It was hinted that the revision of the August numbers would be substantial. Sure enough, the Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported Friday that, seasonally adjusted, 236,000 new private jobs were created in September, with 12,000 additions in the public sector. The August numbers were revised from 142,000 to 180,000. July's number was revised from 212,000 to 243,000.
The official unemployment rate, the one the BLS calls U3, fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest since July 2008. Among the alternative measures of job growth or loss the BLS takes note of each month is U6. This gauge of unemployment and underemployment includes people with no job at all, part-time workers who want full-time jobs and many "discouraged" workers. U6 fell from 12.0 percent in August to 11.8 percent in September, the lowest since October 2008.
By the bureau's count, there are now 927,000 more jobs than at the pre-recession peak.
Both full-time and part-time jobs are included in the BLS total. While hiring full and part-time workers has improved significantly, there's a cruel deficiency: On average those new jobs pay less than the ones people lost because of the Great Recession even if they have been hired into positions substantially similar to what they had before being laid off.
The employment-population ratio remained steady at 59 percent for the fourth consecutive month. The labor force participation rate fell to 62.7 percent, a 36-year low. The civilian labor force decreased by 97,000, after falling by 64,000 in August.
The long-term unemployed—Americans jobless for 27 weeks or more—remained at 3.0 million, 31.9 percent of the total unemployed.
The number of people employed "part time for economic reasons" was little changed in September at 7.1 million. These people want full-time work but have only found part-time positions.
The payroll services company Automatic Data Processing reported on Wednesday a gain in September of a seasonally adjusted 213,000 private-sector jobs. ADP does not report on public-sector jobs and its numbers rarely mesh with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' count of new private-sector jobs.
The BLS offers a caveat that "the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 90,000." In other words, the bureau's statisticians are 90 percent confident that the "real" number of new jobs created in September wasn't actually 248,000, but somewhere in a band between 158,000 and 338,000.
For more details about today's jobs report, please continue reading below the winding orange unemployment queue.
By the bureau's count, 9.3 million people were unemployed in September. That does not include the millions of workers who have left the workforce because they have given up on finding a job.
Among other news in the September job report:
Demographic breakdown of official (U3) seasonally adjusted jobless rate:
• African American: 11.0 percent
• Latino: 6.9 percent
• Asian (not seasonally adjusted): 4.3 percent
• American Indian (data not collected on monthly basis)
• White: 5.1 percent
• Adult women (20 and older): 5.5 percent
• Adult Men (20 and older): 5.3 percent
• Teenagers (16-19): 20.0 percent
Duration of unemployment:
• Less than five weeks: 2.38 million
• 5 to 14 weeks: 2.5 million
• 15 to 26 weeks: 1.4 million
• 27 weeks and more: 2.95 million
Job gains and losses in selected categories:
• Professional services: + 81,000
• Transportation and warehousing : + 1,900
• Leisure & hospitality: + 33,000
• Information: + 12,000
• Health care: + 22,700
• Retail trade: + 35,000
• Construction: + 16,000
• Manufacturing: + 4,000
Hours and wages
• Average work week for all employees on non-farm payrolls rose to 34.6 hours.
• Average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees remained at $20.67.
• Average hourly earnings for all employees on private non-farm payrolls fell 1 cent to $24.53.
Here's what the seasonally adjusted job growth numbers have looked like in September for the previous 10 years.
September 2004: + 162,000
September 2005: + 67,000
September 2006: + 157,000
September 2007: + 85,000
September 2008: - 452,000
September 2009: - 227,000
September 2010: - 57,000
September 2011: + 221,000
September 2012: + 161,000
September 2013: + 164,000
September 2014: + 248,000
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The BLS jobs report is the product of a pair of surveys, one of more than 410,000 business establishments called Current Employment Statistics, and one called the Current Population Survey, which questions 60,000 householders each month. Here is the BLS's explanation of its methodology. The establishment survey determines how many new jobs were added. It is always calculated on a seasonally adjusted basis determined by a frequently tweaked formula. The BLS report only provides a snapshot of what's happening at a single point in time.
It's important to understand that the jobs-created-last-month-numbers that it reports are not "real." Not because of a conspiracy, but because statisticians apply formulas to the raw data, estimate the number of jobs created by the "birth" and "death" of businesses, and use other filters to fine-tune the numbers. And, always good to remember, in the fine print, they tell us, with a 90 percent confidence level, that the actual number of newly created jobs reported each falls within a plus or minus 90,000 range.