What the latest jobs report signals for American workers

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• John Yang:

  We got the latest snapshot of the U.S. economy today the and August jobs numbers. They portray a healthy labor market that's steadily growing, though there are signs of cooling in the face of the Federal Reserve's higher interest rates.

  Employers added 187,000 jobs in August, while the unemployment rate ticked up from 3.5 percent to 3.8, a sign that more Americans are looking for work. In addition, downward revisions to June and July numbers put the average monthly job gain over the last three months to a relatively modest 150,000, down from an average of 238,000 from March through May.

  At the White House, President Biden hailed the 32nd consecutive month of job growth.

  Joe Biden, President of the United States: More than 700,000 people joined the labor force last month, which means the highest share of working-age Americans are in the work force now than at any time in the past 20 years.

  People are coming off the sidelines, getting back to their workplaces, and the lowest unemployment rate in 70 years for America's women.

• John Yang:

  But add today's report to earlier data, you get a complex picture of the current economy.

  Catherine Rampell is a "NewsHour" special correspondent and Washington Post columnist.

  Catherine, well, let's — first, let's talk about the jobs numbers. What was your reaction to the jobs numbers?

• Catherine Rampell:

  I think it was generally a good report.

  Look, these are not the same kind of gangbusters job growth numbers that we saw earlier when the economy was first reopening. But those kinds of numbers were never sustainable. So, a pace along the lines of what we had last month is generally a healthy pace. It's slower than it was.

  That's kind of what the Fed is looking for, honestly, at this point. They want to see evidence that the supply of jobs is about matching the supply of workers, or the supply — the demand for workers is equal to the supply of workers, essentially, and we're headed in that direction.

  I think that there are some concerning signs in the economy which we can talk about. But, for the most part, this was a pretty robust report.

• John Yang:

  And were there anything — was there anything below the big numbers, sort of the top-line numbers, any patterns of who was getting jobs, that you found significant?

• Catherine Rampell:

  I think the unsung heroes of this labor market to date are two categories, immigrants and women.

  You heard Biden just now talk about how women are more than punching above their weight. If you think about a few years ago, there were lots of concerns about the so-called she-cession disproportionately hurting working women, particularly working moms, throwing working women basically back in generation because of the disruptions in childcare, disruptions in schooling that had taken many of them out of the work force or out of their existing jobs.

  That has not materialized. If anything, women are doing better than ever, at least in terms of their participation rates in the labor force and their ability to hold down a job. So, women are basically kicking butt in this economy.

  The other category is immigrants. If you look at who is joining the labor force, why the number of workers has grown quite a bit, it's primarily because of foreign-born workers. Relative to pre-pandemic levels, the number of native-born workers is about flat. It's slightly up. And that's largely because native-born Americans tend to be older.

  They're more likely to be retired, et cetera. Foreign-born workers are more likely to be working age. They're more likely to be in the labor force. And the normalization of the immigration system, which had been set back quite a bit by the pandemic, has enabled many of those foreign-born workers to contribute to the economy and supply those — fill those jobs.

• John Yang:

  Earlier this week, we have got numbers on consumer spending, on inflation. We have seen consumer debt, delinquencies on credit cards, auto loans rising.

  Are these signs of concern?

• Catherine Rampell:

  I think they're a little bit worrying, yes.

  I don't want to use the dreaded R-word, recession. And I don't think we are there yet. There's no sign that we are there yet. But there are some vulnerabilities that are clear in this economy.

  Americans have spent down there extra savings, or a large part of their extra savings that they accumulated during the pandemic, both as a result of forced saving, essentially, not traveling and not going out and dining out and things like that, and also a lot of those fiscal policies, those various government transfers that had helped people amass more savings.

  They have spent a lot of that down, both because time has passed and because prices have been high, et cetera. You see the result of that in those rising credit card delinquency rates, for example, in the lower savings rates that we have seen recently, and some other signs of stress throughout the economy.

  And we don't know the full extent of the consequences of the Fed's rate hikes to date. I mean, the whole point of those rate hikes was to tighten financial conditions and to make it harder for people to borrow and make it less likely that they would spend money. That's a feature, not a bug, of all of that.

  But there is a lag between when the Fed raises rates and when it's ultimately felt. And so we don't know how much more is working its way through the system at this point and how much additional pain that could cause later on.

• John Yang:

  Catherine Rampell, thank you very much.

• Catherine Rampell:

  Thank you.

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