The economy added 103,000 jobs, according to the September jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The return of striking Verizon workers to the job contributed to that increase. What's most noticeable, though, is the continuation of the trend in which the private sector adds jobs while the public sector loses them, a drag on the economy created by the political drive for austerity. In September, the private sector created 137,000 jobs while the public sector lost 34,000.
The August and July reports were revised upward by a combined 99,000 jobs.
The U3 unemployment rate is unchanged at 9.1%—what would once have been considered an emergency level. Fourteen million people are unemployed by this measure, which the BLS notes has been between 9.0% and 9.2% since April. The U6, a measure of unemployment that counts part-time workers who want full-time work and discouraged workers who have not looked for jobs recently enough to be counted in the U3 but would still like to work, rose from 16.2% to 16.5%. That includes 9.3 million people working part-time involuntarily who would prefer full-time work, an increase from 8.8 million.
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (8.8 percent), adult women (8.1 percent), teenagers (24.6 percent), whites (8.0 percent), blacks (16.0 percent), and Hispanics (11.3 percent) showed little or no change in September. The jobless rate for Asians was 7.8 percent, not seasonally adjusted.
Long-term unemployment—those who have been without work for 27 weeks and over—was 6.2 million, accounting for 44.6% of the unemployed. Annie Lowrey notes that "Average duration of unemployment hits its highest-ever recorded level, at 40.5 weeks." (That's mean, not median, duration. The median is 22.2 weeks.)
The labor force participation rate increased very slightly once again, to 64.2% from 64%, and the employment-population ration changed even less, going to 58.3% from 58.2%.
As inadequate as this level of job growth is—the economy needs to add around 150,000 jobs a month to keep up with population growth—it exceeds expectations, especially taken with the upward revision of July and August numbers. Early accounts of the report focus on it as a sign that we're not facing a double-dip recession. Because that's what passes for good news these days: not actual economic recovery, just avoidance of another recession.