US Jobless Rate Falls As Economy Gains Steam

The US economy added 531,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.6 percent, the government reported on Friday, a better-than-expected result indicating hiring is resurging as 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 Labor Department said.

President Joe Biden hailed the acceleration after two months of moderate gains, saying the nation needed to "keep driving vaccinations up and Covid down," for "our economy to fully recover." Biden said vaccines had "made the economy the envy of the world."

A spike in coronavirus infections fueled 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 jobs report -- big job gain, unemployment fell, hours worked increased and wage growth is strong," tweeted Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics.

"Strong evidence that as the Delta-wave of the pandemic winds down, the economy is revving back up."

However, employment is 4.2 million jobs below its peak in February 2020. Job growth has averaged 582,000 per month this year.

The labour force participation rate indicating the share of the people working or looking for a job was also unchanged in October at 61.6 percent, 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 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 percent over the past year. (AFP, Reuters)