Employers added 214,000 jobs in October

Yes, the latest jobs report had an unremarkable headline payrolls number and showed almost no wage growth, but one remarkable figure came out of it: the number of employed people jumped by 683,000.

That’s not only huge; it’s outside the Labor Department’s margin of error of around 400,000 for the household survey, where that number comes from. More often than not, the number of new employed people falls well under that threshold. But in the last year, we’ve started to break that margin a little more often. In the below chart, that 400,000 threshold is marked in a red line.

Congratulations to Josh Brown:

Good find from Ben Casselman.

Today’s jobs report brought the news that average hourly wages have risen by about 2 percent over the past year, which is about in line with where we’ve been for almost two years now — better than in the darkest days of the recession but dramatically worse than before the crisis hit.

Here’s a chart:

Non-farm employers added 214,000 jobs to their payrolls in October, the Labor Department reported Friday. The unemployment rate also ticked downward to 5.8 percent, from 5.9 percent in September.

The biggest job gains came in leisure and hospitality, with 52,000 jobs. Next was education and healthcare, with 41,000, and professional and business services — a broad category that includes accountants and lawyers — with 37,000. Retail added just over 27,000 jobs last month. The only industry that lost jobs was information (which includes broadcasting and publishing), which lost 4,000 workers.

The plight of the long-term unemployed has been one of the dominant narratives of the jobs recovery — and rightly so, as an unusually high number of Americans have been out of work for 6 months or longer. But the Wall Street Journal’s Sudeep Reddy today tweeted about what it means that there’s also an unusually low number of short-term unemployed Americans.

And that might mean good things for workers’ paychecks. The Journal’s Eric Morath writes that the relatively tight labor market for short-term unemployed people might mean that finally, wages will start to tick upward meaningfully. Which would of course be great news for the short-term jobless and everyone currently working...but still doesn’t solve the problem of having 3 million long-term unemployed people.

Jobs day is once again on the horizon — on Friday, the Labor Department will give the latest estimate of how the labor market fared in October.

Economists anticipate that we’ll learn employers added 240,000 jobs to the economy in October, according to estimates from Bloomberg. That’s not far off from the 248,000 added in September, according to last month’s estimate.