Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in October

The American economy gained 638,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate declined to 6.9 percent. It’s good news that job creation is still positive, but it’s bad news that the rate of job creation seems to have flattened out long before we’ve made up the losses of March and April:

There was other bad news too: The number of medium-term unemployed (15-26 weeks) declined substantially, but the number of long-term unemployed (26+ weeks) went up.

Average earnings were slightly higher in October. After adjusting for inflation, blue-collar workers saw their wages increase by about 1 percent.

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