Cornering The Job Market · 2026-09-04 · 23 min
The BLS reported 162,000 jobs added in August, about triple the 55,000 forecast, plus a rare upward revision to prior months. Pete and Peter are skeptical, since downward revisions happen roughly 90% of the time. ADP's competing report told a very different story: private employers added just 38,000 jobs, the slowest month since January, and while the BLS reported 16,000 new manufacturing jobs, ADP reported a decline of 17,000. Pete and Peter can't reconcile the two, and neither can point to which source is right. They also dig into where the BLS job growth actually came from: a large share was government hiring, and about a third, 59,000 jobs, came from food service and drinking places, meaning restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. Not exactly the high-wage growth the economy needs. The bigger concern this week: long-term unemployment. Only 14.3% of people who've been out of work for six months or more find a job in a given month, roughly one in seven, even though the headline unemployment rate sits at a healthy-looking 4.1%.
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