A weak jobs report that was depressed by storms and labor strikes quickly became political fodder on Friday as Republicans and Democrats injected the numbers into their arguments over whether former President Donald J. Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris would be better at managing the economy.
Figures released by the Labor Department showed that job creation stalled in October, with employers adding only 12,000 positions in a month that included a major strike and two destructive hurricanes. Unemployment remained steady at 4.1 percent.
The Biden administration tried to signal this week that the appearance of sluggishness in the labor market was a temporary mirage caused by unusual factors. However, economists noted that there were other indications of softness, with hiring slowing in sectors that would be unlikely to be affected by extreme weather.
President Biden said in a statement that “America’s economy remains strong,” and noted that the United States has had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration under his watch. He claimed that the trade policies being pitched by Republicans to increase tariffs would cost the country thousands of jobs.
White House economists argued in a series of posts on social media that the labor market was healthy, pointing to the fact that the number of people not at work because of bad weather increased by 460,000 in October. They also highlighted that earnings growth was slightly stronger than expected and that nominal wages were up 4 percent on a yearly basis.
“Anyone who’s ignoring the noise in today’s report has a political agenda,” Jared Bernstein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview. “Their skewed analysis should be dismissed out of hand.”
But with four days until the election, Republicans were not willing to dismiss the report as an anomaly.
The Trump campaign said in a statement that the jobs report was a “catastrophe” that “reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy.”
The post Weak Jobs Report Provides Political Fodder Ahead of Election Day appeared first on New York Times.
