While the headline payrolls print was solid, rising by 1.371 million, and the Household Survey showed an even more remarkable increase as the number of employed Americans surged by 3.756 million helping send the unemployment rate sharply lower (as discussed earlier), a look at the composition of job gains reveals that below the “Great Job Numbers” surface as defined by president Trump, there was less than meets the eye.
For one, the one-time impact of the Census had an outlier effect on the August payrolls, due to 238,000 temporary jobs hired for the 2020 Census. This led to a 251,000 jump in Federal workers, and a near record 344,000 increase in total government jobs. This means that government jobs were a whopping 25% of all job gains in August.
Categories: News
