Employers added only 56,000 jobs in October, well below the 150,000 or
so that are needed to keep pace with population growth.

The Labor Department also said that 36,000 fewer jobs were added in
August and September than previously estimated.

"Job growth has kind of stalled out," said Bill Cheney, chief
economist of John Hancock Financial Services in Boston.

"It's a puzzle," he added, noting that economic growth, retail sales
and other indicators remained strong.

Hiring over the last three months has fallen to its lowest level since
the summer of 2003, when the economy finally began to emerge from a
three-and-a-half year hiring slump.

Recent hurricanes have played a role, leaving many Gulf Coast
residents out of work, but job creation was also weak across much of
rest of the country last month, Kathleen P. Utgoff, commissioner of
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, told Congress.

With interest rates rising, the hot housing market cooling and energy
costs coming off a two-decade high, some executives and economists are
concerned that consumer spending will slow in coming months.

For now, though, most forecasters expect hiring to pick up before the
end of the year.

As poor as the October hiring number was, the government's monthly
employment report offered a number of other reasons for optimism.

The jobless rate fell slightly, to 5 percent from 5.1 percent.

It is calculated from a survey of households, which economists
consider less reliable than the much larger survey of businesses that
produces the job-growth numbers.

But the household survey sometimes captures hiring by small companies
before the business survey does, and in recent months it has offered a
rosier picture of the economy.

Last month, for instance, the number of workers holding part-time jobs
because they could not find full-time work dropped to its lowest point
since 2002.

The business survey, meanwhile, showed that the average wage for
rank-and-file workers rose 8 cents last month, to $16.27 an hour.

That is equal to an annualized increase of more than 6 percent.

"There is an increased level of business caution," Drew T. Matus, a
senior economist at Lehman Brothers, said.

"But these kind of wage gains don't make sense in light of the low
level of hiring unless business just decided to pause for the month."

Still, wage growth has risen less than 3 percent in the last year,
while inflation has been running close to 4 percent, effectively
cutting many workers' pay.

The spike in inflation, caused largely by oil prices, seems to have
soured many Americans on the economy, despite its continued growth.

In a recent poll by the University of Michigan, 60 percent of people
said that they expected the next five years to bring periods of
widespread unemployment.

Not since 1992 have so many people given that answer.

In the middle of last year, fewer than 40 percent of respondents did.

In October, car dealers, hotels, restaurants, and movie and music
studios all cut jobs.

Department stores added fewer jobs than they typically do during
October; that shows up as a loss in the Labor Department report,
because the government adjusts its numbers to account for normal
seasonal variations.



From The New York Times, 11/4/05:

Job Growth Slows Sharply, Weighed Down by Energy Costs

By DAVID LEONHARDT

Job growth slowed sharply last month, the Labor Department reported
today, in a sign that high energy prices are hurting the economy and
business executives have become worried that the damage might grow.

________________________________________________________

Harry