October Employment Data

The Daprtment of Labor released its October employment report today, which seems to continue a pattern of mediocre jobs reports.  The net gain in jobs was 80,000 and the unemployment rate went down 0.1 percent to 9%.  Thisis basically whats needed to keep up with population gains, so is comparable to treading water (which is obviously better than drowning).  On the bright side, revisions of the last few reports show substantial increases in the number of new jobs, so perhaps things are a bit better than they seem.

Among the other figures released is that the average time of unemployment is 39.4 weeks (down a little from last month's record 40.5 weeks), all government jobs have lost a net of 323,000 positions over the last year, hourly earnings rose by 0.3% (5 cents) over last month, and the average number of hours worked per week remained steady at 34.3 hours.

-JH