Jobs increased in September, but at disappointing rate

William J.T. Strahan did not need the U.S. Department of Labor to tell him how September's job situation stacked up.

Strahan, executive vice president for human resources for Comcast Cable, already knew the score based on his company's experience: "Overall, hiring is slightly up."

And so it was nationwide, according to the Department of Labor's belated September job report.

The nation's payrolls expanded by 148,000 jobs in September; the unemployment rate dropped slightly to 7.2 percent, from 7.3 percent, according to the report, which was delayed because of the federal government's shutdown.

Economists say that 100,000 or more new jobs are needed each month simply to keep up with population growth. It will take at least 1.7 million more jobs to bring employment back to prerecession levels, and that's not counting the seven million jobs that should have been created to accommodate population growth.

"I still think it's tough," Strahan said. "We're still in recovery."

Comcast's hiring situation also tells a story about unemployment. Nationwide, nearly 11.3 million people remained unemployed, with 4.1 million out of work for more than 27 weeks, the government said.

Strahan said Comcast gets 4,600 applications a day.

Wall Street reacted positively to the Department of Labor report, largely because job growth was tepid. As a result, it doesn't look as if the Federal Reserve will taper off its economic stimulus activities.

In the White House's analysis of the report, Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, cautioned that the labor market has been deteriorating in October.

Other reports, Furman said, "suggest that the shutdown and debt ceiling brinksmanship in the first half of October had a disruptive effect on the labor market."

Furman said that job growth has been steady, but not fast enough.

"Sluggish payroll growth is indicating the economy was not picking up any steam even before the shutdown," said Joel Naroff, a Bucks County economist. "Over the last three months, total job gains have averaged a very disappointing 140,000 while the private sector added only 129,000 per month. It's hard to get good growth with that level of increase."

Employment in September was up in nearly all the broad sectors - construction, manufacturing, retail. However, there was a decline in leisure and hospitality, which has been a steady job creator.

Michael Nenner, manager of the Four Seasons, said his hotel added jobs in September, but his competitors were cutting hours and not replacing staff.

Like Comcast's Strahan, Nenner was attending a city workforce event designed to encourage businesses to use Pennsylvania's CareerLink system to find employees.

Nenner and his human-resources manager, Paul W. Urian, said managers at other hotels complain that the decline in convention business at the Convention Center was hampering hiring.

The Alliance for American Manufacturing looked at Tuesday's numbers and noted that the 2,000-job growth in manufacturing "is too weak to put the U.S. on a sound fiscal footing or get the middle class back on track," Scott Paul, the organization's president, said in a statement.

The Labor Department also updated its July and August numbers, with a net gain of 9,000 jobs as jobs were added in August, but subtracted in July.