Welcome to August Jobs Day

Need a reason to feel good about the latest jobs report? Here’s one: The number of workers who are what the Labor Department calls “part-time for economic reasons” fell by a seasonally adjusted 234,000 from July to August, the Labor Department reported. That’s a good-sized monthly decline added to an already strong downward trend.

That sharp decline at the very end is the July-August decline. And this decline appears in large part due to current workers seeing their situations improving. The Labor Department separates these involuntary part-time workers into two categories: people who couldn’t find full-time work but wanted it and people who are part-time due to “slack work or business conditions,” like getting their hours cut because of slow business.

The 142,000 new jobs reflected in the August jobs report are the definition of tepid job growth. But the coming months will show whether this was just a blip in recent months’ otherwise solid jobs recovery. Either way, in gauging the health of the labor market, it’s not just job counts that matter. One of the closest-watched labor force indicators in the last few months has been earnings. The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos has a helpful summary of where things stand as of August’s jobs report:

You can see Friday’s earnings data as glass-half-full or glass-half-empty, and indeed, economics experts seemed to come down on both sides Friday morning. Brookings Institution’s Justin Wolfers sums it up: there are signs of life in wage growth, but they’re small; you have to dig past one decimal place to find them.

The August jobs report is pretty bleh. But it looks a lot better, as Dan Diamond shows, if you put it in context of where we’ve been over the last few years:

Now you can go to far with this kind of thing: the economy was always going to recover, and the question with any recovery is how fast it happens. In this recovery, the line has not climbed nearly as quickly as we hoped. But it has been steadily climbing, and there are plenty of other countries — including much of Europe — that are mired much further down that curve.

Economists thought the economy would add 230,000 jobs in August, and unemployment would fall to 6.1 percent. They were half right. Or maybe they were all right. Or all wrong.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ preliminary jobs data for August says the economy added only 142,000 jobs, breaking a six-month streak in which it added more than 200,000 jobs each month, and the unemployment rate did indeed fall to 6.1 percent.

The August payrolls figure came in far behind expectations, as the Labor Department reported Friday. That’s a discouraging downturn, but FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman points to an upsetting longer-term trend.

Keep in mind that this isn’t just people who are quitting the labor force because they had jobs and decided to retire; this is people who left the labor force after already being jobless. Reversing this trend would be a clear sign that the job market is on the mend.

The newest figures from the Labor Department show that non-farm employers added 142,000 jobs last month, well below consensus estimates of 225,000 to 230,000. The unemployment rate ticked downward slightly from 6.2 to 6.1 percent.

The Labor Department also found there were 28,000 fewer new jobs in June and July than previously estimated. It revised June’s count from 298,000 to 267,000 and July’s count up slightly, from 209,000 to 212,000.

Today, the Labor Department will release its estimates for August job creation. Economists polled by Bloomberg’s have the jobless rate ticking down slightly, from 6.2 to 6.1 percent, and payroll growth coming in at 230,000 additional jobs.

That would make it the seventh straight month of job growth over 200,000 (assuming June and July’s estimates are not revised below that threshold), a feat not matched since 1997. Below is a look at the latest run of jobs numbers.