The US added another 150,000 jobs in October as the jobs market cooled. The unemployment rate rose to 3.9%.
Economists had been expecting the US to add 180,000 jobs over the month. The pace of job growth slowed sharply from September when the economy added a revised 297,000 – far higher than had been expected.
“It is difficult to believe that an economy with below 4% unemployment can sustain this pace of job growth,” Dean Baker, senior economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in commentary this week.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised the job growth figures for August and September and said job gains had been a combined 101,000 lower than first reported.
The US’s wave of strike actions impacted the jobs figures. Manufacturing employment fell by 35,000 jobs as members of the United Auto Workers union took industrial action against Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.
But there were also declines in transportation and warehousing, information and finance, which were unaffected by strikes.
Earlier this week ADP, the US’s largest payroll supplier, said private employers added 113,000 workers in October, lower than had been expected.
Wages rose by 5.7% from a year ago, according to ADP, the smallest annual gain since October 2021. “Big post-pandemic pay increases seem to be behind us,” said ADP’s chief economist, Nela Richardson. “In all, October’s numbers paint a well-rounded jobs picture. And while the labor market has slowed, it’s still enough to support strong consumer spending.”
The jobs figures came in a week when the Federal Reserve announced it was holding interest rates steady. The Fed has been aggressively raising rates to tamp down inflation, now running at an annual rate of 3.7% and down from 9.1% in June 2022.
Fed chair Jerome Powell cautioned that the Fed’s campaign to bring down price growth has “a long way to go” and left the door open to further rate hikes.
