When the September jobs report finally came out – it was delayed seven weeks by the federal government shutdown – it contained some unexpected news: The job market had a pretty good month.
According to the report, U.S. employers added 119,000 jobs in September, more than double the 50,000 economists had predicted.
The news wasn’t all good. According to an Associated Press report, Labor Department revisions showed some 4,000 jobs were lost in August instead of seeing a gain of 22,000 as originally reported. Altogether, revisions cut 33,000 jobs off July and August payrolls, according to the AP report. The economy had also shed jobs in June, the first time since the 2020 pandemic that the monthly jobs report has gone negative twice in one year.
Of the September job gains, according to the AP report, more than 87% came in two industries: healthcare and social assistance and leisure and hospitality.
“We’ve got these strong headline numbers, but when you look underneath that you’ll see that a lot of that is driven by healthcare,” Cory Stahle, senior economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab, told the AP. ”At the end of the day, the question is: Can you support an economic expansion on the back of one industry? Anybody would have a hard time arguing everybody should become a nurse.”
The unemployment rate rose to 4.4% in September. That’s the highest it’s been since October 2021 and an increase from 4.3% in August, according to the Labor Department. The jobless rate rose partly because 470,000 people entered the labor market — either working or looking for work — in September and not all of them found jobs right away, according to the AP..
Labor Department figures show healthcare and social assistance firms added more than 57,000 jobs in September, restaurants and bars 37,000, construction companies 19,000 and retailers almost 14,000. Manufacturing didn’t fare as well — factories shed 6,000 jobs, the fifth straight monthly drop. The federal government lost 3,000 jobs, the eighth straight monthly decline..
The jobs numbers could cause Federal Reserve officials to delay what was expected to be another rate cut in December. The September jobs report will be the last one the Fed will see before its Dec. 9-10 meeting.
