Understanding DOL's monthly jobs report

Each month the Bureau of Labor Stats at the Department of Labor issues its Employment Report, including the latest official stats on unemployment, job growth (or loss), payroll and earnings. And, of course, they revise figures from their previous releases.

Making sense of what this data means in the real world isn't always easy. You can check out the White House spin, or you can read the business media to find out how Wall Street reacted.

One good source of analysis is the monthly Jobs Byte from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Dean Baker and Heather Boushey take turns analyzing the Employment Report and publishing a same-day briefing on the CEPR site. You can subscribe and get it sent to your inbox. CEPR offers Data Bytes on other government data, including prices, gross domestic product, and some less-regular reports.

What's their bottom-line analysis of last Friday's report? 

The net picture in this report is fairly ambiguous. The job growth reported for September is largely in line with expectations, but the upward revisions for the prior two months indicate that the labor market has been somewhat stronger than previously believed. Still, there is considerable basis for concern about this pattern of growth. Manufacturing employment may stabilize in the months ahead, but construction employment will almost certainly continue downward. It is unlikely that the job growth in health care and restaurants will be sufficient to keep the labor market strong.