254,000 Jobs? Healthy Job Markets?

Even In Its Best Light, The Data Does Not Support That Narrative.

Once again, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released a seemingly stellar Employment Situation Summary Report.

Once again, the media is slavishly celebrating the good news and the miraculous wisdom of that economic titan Jerome Powell, who is steadily steering the economy to a “soft landing” over inflation.

Once again, the media and the (Biden-)Harris Administration pander and preen about how “strong” the US economy is.

Once again, we must realize that this is all a load of crap. The numbers do not hold together, and fall apart the moment we look under the hood at the details.

There is little doubt that corporate media is simply derelict in not questioning the narrative being pushed out by the BLS. They are simply regurgitating the numbers and not interrogating the data.

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 254,000 in September, and the unemployment rate changed little at 4.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in food services and drinking places, health care, government, social assistance, and construction.

We can tell they are not questioning the numbers by how they are reporting them.

America’s employers added a surprisingly strong 254,000 jobs in September, easing concerns about a weakening labor market and suggesting that the pace of hiring is still solid enough to support a growing economy.

Last month’s gain was far more than economists had expected, and it was up sharply from the 159,000 jobs that were added in August. And after rising for most of 2024, the unemployment rate dropped for a second straight month, from 4.2% in August to 4.1% in September, the Labor Department said Friday.

Of course, all of the propgandizing is in service of the narrative that there will be a “soft-landing” in the US economy, or even a “no-landing”—where there is not even a slowdown in economic growth, thanks to the genius of the Federal Reserve.

A gravity-defying jobs market, at least a slowing pace of price increases and declining interest rates puts the macro picture in a pretty good place right now — a critical time from a policy and political standpoint.

“We’ve been expecting a soft landing. This just gives us more confidence that it seems to remain in place,” Beth Ann Bovino, chief economist at U.S. Bank, said after Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report. “It also increases the possibility of a no-landing as well, meaning even stronger economic data for 2025 than we currently expect.”

As one naturally expects, the White House is happy to take yet another unearned, undeserved victory lap on the economy.

Does a closer look at the underlying data support any of this?

Not even a little bit. Then again, there’s nothing new about BLS stats being pure BS. That’s been the norm for pretty much all of the past few years at the very least.

If 254,000 jobs is not a reliable number, what does the data actually say about job creation in September?

Certainly not 254,000 jobs created.

The first reason to question the BLS jobs data is the alternative employment report put out every month by ADP. According to their National Employment Report, in September 143,000 jobs were created.

Somewhat ominously, Big Business was the clear leader in jobs creation.

Even so, 143,000 is not 254,000. This is a pretty wide variance, and a significant one, as for most of this year the two reports have been relatively close to one another.

For the two reports to diverge abruptly in this fashion gives good cause to doubt the underlying data on both reports. While only one report can be accurate no matter what the actual jobs data is, it is quite possible for both reports to be significantly inaccurate.

Yet even if the 254,000 jobs number is more or less accurate, it still does not equate to a solid or even encouraging state of the US jobs market.

One particularly disconcerting data point to consider is that the number of individual working more than one job has increased for the third straight month.

121,000 of the jobs presumably created went to people who already had jobs.

This imbalance highlights another unusual aspect of the September jobs report— the bulk of employment gains went to individuals 16-19 years old.

When a relatively small segment of the labor pool gets such a disproportionately large portion of the jobs presumably created, we may be certain that something is out of balance. It may very well be that many of these jobs are for the coming holiday season only, which means these jobs will disappear with the coming of the new year—and that is not the sort of broad economic improvement that is being claimed in the corporate media.

Yet even the seeming success of the 16-19 year old cohort this past month is not enough to shift the longer term trend of declining youth employment in this country.

America’s youth and young adults have been experiencing overall job loss since last spring and summer (yet another hallmark of the “jobs recession” I’ve discussed previously). If the jobs currently going to 16-19 year olds are not of any permanence, this trend is only going to continue, and that does not bode well for the future of the American labor force.

The potential for job impermanence also highlights another persistent weakness in the US economy: there are still over a million fewer individuals working full time than there were in November of last year.

Without full time levels of work people are going to be challenged to make a living working just one job. Yet declining levels of full time work has been another feature of the US labor force since last fall.

This lack of full-time work also calls our attention to another area of weakness within the overall employment picture: Manufacturing is still not showing much in the way of job growth.

If the ADP numbers are the more accurate data set, manufacturing employment in this country has returned to long-term decline, and even the BLS data set shows recent losses in manufacturing employment.

Manufacturing employment should be of particular significance, as the nation had a brief reminder of our continued vulnerability to supply shocks from the recent longshoreman’s strike. Bringing manufacturing—and manufacturing jobs—back to the United States is the one way to insulate the overall economy against such dislocations, and a decline in manufacturing employment is an indication the econom is moving in the wrong direction in at least that regard.

Once again, we are left with a jobs report that, in the best case scenario, is yet another illustration of the levels of imbalance and disquilibrium in the nation’s economy. In the worst case, the jobs report is a wild exaggeration that will result in yet more significant corrections over the next few months.

The headline numbers certainly sound positive and optimistic. The headline numbers certainly feed the narrative of economic health and resiliency being promoted by the corporate media.

When we look beyond the headline numbers, however, we find once again numerous signs of a labor market that is still toxic and an economy that is still experiencing an ongoing jobs recession that has yet to abate.

Everyone prefers to hear good news rather than bad news. We naturally want to hear that we are doing well, and not that we are doing poorly. That much is simple human nature.

However, we are not served by being wrongly told all is well when all is not well—and, for the US economy, all is not well. The US economy is seeing weakening employment and job loss. The US labor force is seeing a decline in overall youth participation. The US labor force is not seeing enough growth among full-time jobs to cover a growing labor force.

The corporate media once again is doing people a disservice by pushing a narrative that is divorced from the underlying data. No matter how attractive that narrative might be, the data is what describes reality. Always follow the data.