The US economy maintains seemingly solid growth, but the job market is starting to show signs that something is happening in the engine of the world’s leading power. 119,000 jobs were created in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Thursday.
Data on job creation improves analysts’ forecasts. The figure is the best since April, when 158,000 jobs were created, and leaves behind a summer of job destruction attributed, among other issues, to the tightening of immigration policies ordered by US President Donald Trump.
Despite good September data, which improves economists’ expectations, the job creation figure is the lowest in a September since before the pandemic. Which gives reason to those who defend the deterioration of the labor market. So far this year, 684,000 jobs have been created, the lowest figure in the first nine months of the pandemic. To give you an idea, the jobs created up to September are almost half compared to last year, in the same period in which 1,384,000 jobs were created.
The statistics office revised the data for July and August and the result confirms what many expected: a slowdown in the job market during the summer. “The change in nonfarm employment for July was revised down by 7,000, from 79,000 to 72,000, and the change for August was revised down by 26,000, which shows a job loss of 4,000 people in August. “With this new data, job creation in July and August was 33,000 fewer people than previously reported,” he explains the agency.
Economists and analysts awaited the data with trepidation because the federal government shutdown for 43 days, the longest in history, threw the country into a statistical blackout and delayed the publication of the main parameters that help interpret the economic situation. The job creation data for September therefore arrives six weeks late. The administrative freeze throughout October and nearly half of November affected October data collection. The White House has admitted that in the next publications there will be a statistical leap that will influence the employment data.
The unemployment rate increased again in April, to 4.4%. You have to go back to October 2021, at the height of the pandemic, to find a higher unemployment rate. The statistics office estimates that there were 7.6 million unemployed workers in April, the highest number since September 2021, when the covid crisis caused the closure of numerous companies. Since last January, when Trump returned to the White House for his second term, about 730,000 more people have registered for unemployment.
“Employment continued to increase in the healthcare, food and supermarket, restaurant and social services sectors. In contrast, job losses occurred in transportation, warehousing and the federal government,” the federal office of the Department of Labor said in a statement.
“Among major groups of workers, the highest unemployment rates were for adult women (4.2%) and Asians (4.4%). Unemployment rates for adult men (4.0%) and adolescents (13.2%) increased in September,” the statistics office explains.
Federal government employment continued to decline in September (3,000) and is down 97,000 positions from its peak in January. (Employees on paid leave or receiving ongoing severance pay are counted as employees in the establishment survey.)
