WASHINGTON: The US economy added 531,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.6 per cent, the government reported on Friday, a better-than-expected result, indicating hiring is resurging as the Covid-19 infections decline.
A wide range of industries added jobs in October, including manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, and the hard-hit leisure and hospitality sector, though public education employment declined, the Labour Department said.
A spike in the coronavirus infections fuelled by the fast-spreading Delta variant held employment down in August and September, but the report brought welcome news: upward revisions to both months that indicated hiring was 235,000 higher than first reported.
“We got an unambiguously strong October job report, big job gain, unemployment fell, hours worked increased and wage growth is strong,” Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics tweeted.
“Strong evidence that as the Delta wave of the pandemic winds down, the economy is revving back up.”
However, evidence of the massive damage done to the American workforce by the historic downturn that began in March 2020 remained evident.
The labour force participation rate, indicating the share of the people working or looking for a job, was unchanged in October at 61.6 per cent, which the Federal Reserve will surely take note of, as it gauges whether the economy has returned to full employment.
The numbers of permanent job losers and the people on temporary layoff changed little over the month, and remains higher than before the pandemic, the data said.
And with inflation worryingly high, amid global supply chain snarls, another of the Fed’s major concerns, the data showed wages rose again last month, and are up 4.9 per cent over the last year.