The BLS just released the Employment Situation Summary for October 2011 and while the headline Establishment Survey number of 80,000 was a bit below expectations, the internals of the report are much better than the headline would have us believe.
Let us turn to the Household Survey for the yeoman's work of this report, as this survey shows that the unemployment rate (U-3) declined by .1 to 9.0%. Now, while that isn't a big decline, it at least was caused by both an increase in the number of employed (up 277,000) and a decrease in those unemployed (down 95,000). This also occurred while the labor force expanded by nearly 200,000 people and the "not in the labor force" number barely increased (up about 20,000, which is good because retirements are adding to this number every month). In other words, jobs were created, the unemployed got some of them, and more people looked for work this month than last.
Also in this report, we saw U-6 decline by .3 to 16.2%, which is likely in part related to the decline (of over 300k) of people employed "part-time for economic reasons". And since unemployment didn't increase, we can reasonably assume that many of these people may have indeed had their hours increased as opposed to having received a layoff notice.
Finally, in the good news department were the positive revisions to prior months, with August going up from 57,000 to 104,000 (remember all those headlines about 0 jobs that month) and September going up from plus 103k to plus 158k.
In the bad news department (although to some I guess this is good news), government jobs declined by 24k in the Establishment Survey in October, with the bulk of those coming at the state level.
Overall, while this report isn't exactly spectacular, considering where we have been and all the talk of a double dip recession it is actually reasonably decent. Couple that with the much improved internals of the report (specifically the Household Survey), the recent GDP numbers, and the recent declines in initial claims, and we have some reason to be hopeful about the remaining two months in the year.
