For the first time since September 2010, U.S. nonfarm employers shed jobs last month. But that could reflect hurricane-related disruptions more than an actual change in underlying labor-market conditions.The unemployment rate dropped to 4.2% in September, a level not seen since early 2001, because more Americans found jobs even as the labor force expanded.The Labor Department said the hurricanes didn’t appear to affect the unemployment rate for last month.Another sign of hurricane-related distortions in Friday’s report: Nearly 1.5 million people reported in September that they had a job but weren’t at work due to bad weather.Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers were $26.55 in September, jumping 0.45% from the prior month and rising 2.9% over the past year. The pop could reflect, in part, low-wage workers dropping out of the sample because they weren’t working due to the hurricanes.The labor-force participation rate has stabilized in recent years, though the aging U.S. population and other headwinds may send it lower in the future. It was 63.1% last month, up 0.2 percentage point from a month earlier.
https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2017/10/06/september-jobs-report-the-numbers-3/
No comments:
Post a Comment