unemployment
attribution: Calculated Risk
After half a year of job growth above 200,000 each month, the U.S. economy generated just 134,000 seasonally adjusted new private-sector jobs in August, along with 8,000 public-sector jobs. That total of 142,000 reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday was the lowest since December 2013. It was also more than 80,000 fewer than the consensus of experts had thought it would be.
The official unemployment rate, the one the BLS calls U3, fell to 6.1 percent.  The bureau also presents several alternative measures of job growth or loss each month, the most important being U6. This includes not only people with no job at all but also those who are working part time and want (and need) full-time jobs and many "discouraged" workers. It thus covers theunemployed and underemployed, but does not cover those who have left the labor force whatever their reasons for doing so even if that is despair over not being able to find work. U6 fell to 12.2 percent in July to 12.0 percent in August.
The bureau revised the number of jobs originally reported in July from 209,000 to 212,000, and in June from 298,000 to 267,000.
By the bureau's count, there are now 610,000 more jobs than at the pre-recession peak.
The payroll services company Automatic Data Processing reported on Wednesday a gain in of August of a seasonally adjusted 204,000 private-sector jobs. ADP does not report on public-sector jobs. Its calculation and BLS's for the private-sector rarely mesh closely as it clearly did not for August.
The BLS offers a caveat that "the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 90,000." In other words, the bureau's statisticians are 90 percent confident that the "real" number of new jobs created in August wasn't actually 142,000, but somewhere in a band between 232,000 and 52,000.
Both full-time and part-time jobs are included in the bureau's total. A woman who reports she was hired to work 15 hours a week in August is counted the same as someone hired to work 40 hours a week.
For more details http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/05/1326332/-August-job-creation-way-below-expectations-at-142-000?detail=hide