BLS Jobs Report Points To the "Meh" Economy

Kevin Glass | November 07, 2014 8:41 AM

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released their report on non-farm payroll jobs today and estimated that the American economy added 214,000 jobs - pointing to an economy that continues to be sluggish. The workforce participation rate is unchanged from a year ago, at 62.8%. The unemployment rate edged slightly downward over the past month, though, and now sits at 5.8%.

A lot of key numbers when it comes to the numbers of unemployed remained unchanged. The long-term unemployed, the participation rate, the number of people underemployed, and the number of "discouraged workers" - people who have basically given up looking for work - all remained relatively unchanged.

Average hourly earnings remained unchanged, but the length of Americans' workweek is the highest since May 2008.

It's important to look for future revisions as well. This report, for example, revises BLS's estimates for August and September upwards by 31,000 jobs. August, which had been the worst jobs month of the year so far, was revised up from 180,000 to 203,000 jobs added.

Pre-report guidelines pointed to a report that would have come back with over 200,000 jobs, but this falls short of those expectations. Non-government payroll firm ADP estimated 230,000 jobs were added in the month of October, and MarketWatch's survey of economists produced a consensus guess of 243,000 - again, significantly higher than what the BLS actually estimated.