US turns around weak jobs reports, adds more than half a million jobs

According to the October jobs report, released Friday by the Labor Department, the United States added 531,000 jobs last month. That’s a step up from recent, weaker jobs reports. It’s also the most jobs added in the U.S. since July. Nearly a third of the jobs added came from the leisure and hospitality sector. This indicates more people are going out to eat and travel.

“Job growth was widespread, with notable job gains in leisure and hospitality, in professional and business services, in manufacturing, and in transportation and warehousing,” Friday’s report said.

While many sectors added jobs, the report also said “employment in public education declined over the month”. The only industry to report a job loss was the government.

In more good news, the unemployment rate dropped from 4.8% in September to 4.6% in October. That is a pandemic low, however, it’s still well above the pre-pandemic jobless rate of 3.5%.

“The number of unemployed persons, at 7.4 million, continued to trend down. Both measures are down considerably from their highs at the end of the February-April 2020 recession,” the report said. “However, they remain above their levels prior to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic (3.5 percent and 5.7 million, respectively, in February 2020).”

In addition to beating August and September numbers, October’s report showed those August and September numbers weren’t as bad as initially reported. The government revised its estimate of hiring for those two months, adding a combined 235,000 jobs between the two.

Experts say October’s jobs report shows the Delta variant is loosening its grip on the economy.

“This is the kind of recovery we can get when we are not sidelined by a surge in COVID cases,” Nick Bunker said. He is the director of economic research at the employment website Indeed. “The speed of employment gains has faltered at times this year, but the underlying momentum of the US labor market is quite clear.”

Not every part of Friday’s report was encouraging. The number of people either working or looking for a job was virtually unchanged in October. This means it appears decreasing cases, the reopening of schools in September and the expiration of a $300-a-week federal unemployment supplement have yet to coax more people to find work. The stall comes just under a month after the Labor Department reported a record number of Americans quit their jobs in August.