US Companies Add Jobs; Unemployment Stable
Oct 3, 11:33 AM (ET)
By LEIGH STROPE
WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation’s unemployment rate held steady at 6.1 percent in September as businesses added to payrolls for the first time in eight months, suggesting a turnaround in the weak job market.
A survey of U.S. companies showed a net increase of 57,000 jobs last month in wide-ranging industries, the Labor Department reported Friday, and there was new hope for recovery in the slumping manufacturing sector. Some 29,000 factory jobs were lost, but that was considerably fewer than in previous months.
Economists had expected the overall civilian unemployment rate to rise to 6.2 percent, with a loss of 25,000 more jobs.
“This is potentially the key turning point,” said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors.
Let’s see, Clinton handed Bush a stock market crash and a tanking economy and then nine months into the Bush presidency, the economy was dealt another brutal blow with the 9/11 attacks. Despite all this, the recession officially ended in November of that year, only eight months after it had begun.
The fact of the matter is, however, that it’s never going to feel like a recovery for those who are still out of work, and while new jobs always lag behind recoveries, this recovery has had an especially long draught waiting for the news jobs to arrive following the positive numbers in GDP.
While many Democrats key strategy is to use the unemployment numbers for all they can in the upcoming election, most economists agree that the historically unprecidented rise in productivity has been the number one factor in allowing businesses to fill the increasing demand of the recovery without requiring the addition of new workers to the payroll. This constant rise in productivity had been good for business’ bottom line, but bad for the American workers. However, I think most people can understand that businesses by their very natures must be concerned with the bottom line first and foremost and I also think if most people were to understand this key factor of the heretofore “jobless recovery”, they’ll realize that a president can’t really take very much of the blame when technology spurs productivity.
Given all these circumstances, the fact that jobs are finally being added to the recovery is an incredibly good sign and an absolute surprise to the conventional wisdom that it would still take more time before employment would catch up with the rest of the recovery.
It’s true that Presidents almost always get too much of the blame when the economy is going bad and too much of the credit when the economy is going good, so most of the credit for this turnaround should go to the American people themselves.
Either way, however, you might call this turnaround a meager success, but I call it a minor miracle.
