The American economy gained 250,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at a respectable 160,000 jobs. The unemployment rate stayed steady at 3.7 percent.
![](https://develop.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/blog_net_jobs_october_2018.gif)
Wages of production and nonsupervisory workers were up at a monthly rate of 0.31 percent and a year-over-year rate of 0.86 percent. That’s not bad at all.
![](https://develop.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/blog_growth_hourly_wages_nonsupervisory_2011_20181.gif)
Finally, the labor force participation ticked up 0.2 percent. Assuming that the increase was the same for prime-age workers (age 25-54), it means that prime-age workers are continuing to enter (or re-enter) the labor force. We’re still about a percentage point below where we could be, but that’s a guess since there’s been a secular decline in the participation rate for both men and women ever since 2000, so we don’t really know where we “should” be in the first place.
![](https://develop.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/blog_prime_age_labor_participation_2003_2018.gif)
BLS warns that Hurricane Michael may have affected the employment numbers, but probably not significantly. So with the usual caveat that one month doesn’t mean a lot, this was a very nice employment report, especially the wage data.