Despite the recent Federal Reserve interest rate increase, which was aimed to slow the job market, October was a strong month for the nation’s labor market. The country saw an increase of 261,000 jobs for the month, however, the unemployment rate still rose to 3.7%. The interest rate hike was taken in part to cool down job growth, but there are still nearly two jobs for every available unemployed worker. This is still well above the pre-pandemic average monthly pace of 164,000 labor increase in 2019.
Breakdown of the numbers
The DOW Jones estimate for payroll growth for October was only 205,000, but they did also anticipate less than a 3.5% unemployment rate, which is currently sitting above their estimate. From October of last year, hourly earnings have grown 4.7% and 0.4% for the month. This likely indicates that wage growth is pressuring inflation. However, wage growth expectations were met for the year and 0.3% was estimated for the month, so it is a little ahead of schedule.
Still Job Loss
The higher-than-expected growth of the labor market isn’t applying to all companies, however. A multitude of larger companies are making job cuts and introducing hiring freezes. On Thursday, Amazon started to pause hiring for roles in their corporate workforce, this came after they already announced a hiring freeze for its corporate retail sector as well.
Apple also said they will be freezing new hires in all sectors of the company, excluding research and development. Lyft reportedly will be trimming 13% of its workforce, and online payment company “Stripe” will be cutting 14% of its workers.
Wrap Up
Despite the hiring freezes and job cuts from some of the larger companies, it is still encouraging to see a plethora of new hires over the last month and especially since it was a number higher than anticipated. Hopefully, the nation keeps this trend in the future.