At first glance today's jobs report was indeed impressive: the surge in jobs according to both the household and establishment surveys indicated a strong rebound from recent monthly weakness... ... which coupled with the drop in unemployment rate, and upward historical revisions suggested that much of the recent labor market weakness may have been transitory.
Instead for now let's focus on the parts of the jobs report which the BLS has traditionally used to mask headline weakness, such as part-time workers used to mask weakness in full-time jobs, or foreign-born workers surging at the expense of native-born.
Well, this month there was little of that as well, and in fact, part-time workers dropped modestly as full-time workers rose while native-born workers actually rebounded from a five year low as foreign-born workers dropped from an all-time high And yet, it didn't take long to find what the BLS did this time to make the jobs appear much stronger than expected, a political imperative for the highly politicized agency tasked with making the Kamala/Biden economy appear stronger than it was exactly one month ahead of the election.
Only not this time, because as noted earlier by Andrew Zatlin of Southbay Research, while historically the September adjusted number has been relatively tame, regardless of how large or small the unadjusted number was, this time something changed as the unadjusted number of government workers absolutely exploded by a record 1.322 million leading to a record September increase in adjusted government workers.
In September, the number of government workers as tracked by the Household Survey soared by 785K, from 21.421 million to 22.216 million, both seasonally adjusted (source: Table A8 from the jobs report).
This was the biggest monthly surge in government workers on record (excluding the outlier print in June 2020 which was a reversal of the record plunge from the Covid collapse months before).
While government workers soared by the most on record, private workers rose by just 133K, a far more believable number, and one which however would indicate that the recent labor market malaise continues.
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