The doomsayers had a rough Friday.
The Labor Department reported that American employers added 162,000 jobs in August — nearly triple what the economists on cable news had penciled in.
The consensus call, from surveys run by CNBC and The Wall Street Journal, was for a gain of around 53,000. The country blew past it. It was the strongest month of hiring since March, and it landed at a moment when a lot of people in the press had already written the labor market’s obituary.
Unemployment held at 4.1%. Steady. Not creeping up, the way some had bet it would.
Here’s the part the headline writers buried…
July, which was first reported as a loss of 23,000 jobs — cue the front-page hand-wringing about a “surprise contraction” — has now been revised up to a gain of 21,000.
June got a bump too, up to 31,000. Two months that were supposed to show a cracking economy turned out to be evidence of nothing much at all once the real numbers came in.
Paychecks got fatter, too. Average hourly earnings rose 10 cents to $37.75, up 3.1% over the past year — comfortably ahead of inflation.
The workweek ticked up. And 414,000 Americans who’d been stuck in part-time jobs for economic reasons found their way into something closer to full-time. The broader U-6 measure, which counts the discouraged and the underemployed, fell to 7.7%, its best reading since last June.
The growth wasn’t concentrated in one lucky sector, either. Restaurants and bars added 59,000 jobs. Local government education added 42,000.
And in a detail Rust Belt families will notice before anyone in a D.C. newsroom does, manufacturing added 16,000 — real, physical, hands-on-a-machine jobs, the kind a factory-first trade policy was built to bring home.
Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, speaking at Jackson Hole days before this report landed, said labor markets are “quite stable” and that the unemployment rate “remains low by historical standards.”
Friday’s numbers backed him up. The bigger question now is what the Fed does with rates less than two weeks from now — and whether inflation data, not the jobs market, ends up being the deciding factor.
The American worker had a good month. It came despite an aging workforce, a war in the Middle East pushing on oil prices, and a press corps that seemed almost disappointed not to get more bad news to report.
Turns out the country’s still building things, feeding people, and teaching kids.
And getting paid a little more to do it.
