Mother Jones
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The economy added 204,000 jobs in October, according to jobs numbers released Friday by the Labor Department, despite the two-week government shutdown that put thousands temporarily out of work, and which economists predicted would dampen last month’s numbers. The jobs gain is about twice as many as expected. Employment numbers for August and September were also revised upwards by a total of 60,000 jobs, signaling the economy is strengthening, despite Republican efforts to tank it through budget cuts, shutdowns and default scares.
Even though jobs were added, the unemployment rate increased a tenth of a percentage point to 7.3 percent. This is because of the way job growth is tallied. As Catherine Rampell explained at the New York Times last month:
The jobs report is based on two different surveys—one of households, and one of employers—and it turns out that furloughed federal government workers will be treated as unemployed in the first survey but employed in the second. In other words, the temporary layoff of federal workers will probably increase the unemployment rate, but not (at least directly) depress the payroll job growth numbers.
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