The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September, as more workers joined the labor force and so officially became counted as unemployed.
The report showed
persistent but modest improvement in the American economy, and
broad-based gains in just about every industry except the government. It
was based on surveys conducted too early in the month to capture work
disruptions across the East Coast caused by Hurricane Sandy.
“Generally, the report shows that things are better than we’d expected
and certainly better than we’d thought a few months ago,” said Paul
Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics. “But we’re
still not making enough progress to bring that unemployment rate down
significantly and rapidly.”
The latest figures are probably good news for President Obama. They
officially recorded a net gain in jobs under his presidency, and they
allayed widespread suspicion
that September’s large drop in the unemployment rate — below 8 percent
for the first time since the month he took office — might have been a
one-month statistical fluke.
In a statement,
Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic
Advisers, said Friday’s report provided “further evidence that the U.S.
economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst
downturn since the Great Depression.”
Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement
that the jobs report is evidence of the need to change the nation’s
economic policies.
“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” he said.
The numbers arrived somewhat late in the game to have a huge impact on
the election next Tuesday, particularly given the ongoing focus on
Hurricane Sandy.
Economists were hopeful that once the election was over and Congress
addressed the major fiscal tightening scheduled for the end of this
year, job growth could speed up further.
“If we can do this kind of job growth with all the uncertainty out
there, imagine if we were to clear up those tax issues and hold back the
majority of tax increases that are pending at the end of the year,”
said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We could do much
better in 2013, maybe as well as we appeared to be doing earlier this
year.”
Job gains in previous months were revised to show bigger gains.
September’s increase of 114,000 new jobs was revised to 148,000, and
August’s 142,000 was revised to 192,000, the government said.
In October, the biggest job gains were in professional and business
services, health care and retail trade, the Labor Department said.
Government payrolls dipped slightly. State and local governments have
been shedding jobs most months over the last three years.
One of the lowlights of the report was in hourly wages, which remained
flat in October after showing barely any growth in the previous several
months.
“Perhaps the decline in real wages is a factor here in being able to
employ more people,” Mr. Ryding said. “It’s something to keep in mind
when we think about creating jobs and whether we’re maybe creating the
wrong sort of jobs.”
A report
from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and
advocacy organization that focuses on labor issues, found that while the
majority of jobs lost in the downturn were middle-wage jobs, the
majority of the jobs created since then have been lower-wage ones.
There have now been 25 straight months of jobs gains in the United
States, but the increases have been barely large enough to absorb people
entering the work force. A queue of about 12 million unemployed people
remain waiting for work, about two out of five of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.
That is in addition to more than eight million people who are working part-time but really want full-time jobs.
“I’m not just competing against all the other people who are out of
work,” said Griff Coxey, 57, of Cascade, Wis., who was laid off in May
from his controller job at a small business. “I’m also competing against
all those people who are actually working but are underemployed.”
Like two million other idle workers, Mr. Coxey is scheduled to lose his
unemployment benefits the last week of the year, when the federal
extensions abruptly expire. He said he still has some savings to fall
back on, but many workers do not.
Labor advocates and economists are hopeful that Congress will renew the benefits as part of their discussions of the “fiscal cliff”
during their postelection session. So far, though, the issue has
received little attention, and analysts worry that ending extended
benefits could disrupt what modest forward momentum the economy
currently has.
“Federal unemployment benefits are one of the most effective stimuli we
have,” said Christine L. Owens, the executive director of the National
Employment Law Project.
“The recovery is still fragile,” she said, “and to pull that amount of
income and expenditure out of the economy — particularly at a time when
people thinking about the holiday season — will have a significant
impact on not just those individuals and their families but the economy
as a whole.”
Friday’s jobs report is unlikely to affect policy from the Federal Reserve, which has pledged open-ended stimulus until the job market improves “substantially.”
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