Job market strengths and weaknesses in October 2026
San José, CA – On Friday, November 6, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their monthly report on the jobs market in October 2026. While the corporate-owned media mainly focused on the strengths of the report, there were also weaknesses in the job market that affect the working class in the United States.
On the strong side, the report said that 165,000 net new jobs were created in October. This is more than twice as many as most economists predicted. In addition, the numbers for August and September were revised up by a total of 84,000.
Some of the weaknesses were that the annual gain in wages was 3.1%, less than the 3.7% gain in consumer prices through September. While the report on prices for October will be released on Tuesday, November 10, it would take a large drop in prices in October to bring the inflation rate down to a break even with wages.
The fall in real wages, or the purchasing power of wages, could be seen in another report released on Thursday, November 5 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which is under the Department of Commerce. That report said that workers’ share of total income fell to its lowest level since it was first tracked in 1947. Workers’ share began its decline around 1960, but the decline was very slow until 2000. Since then, workers’ share has gone down by almost 20%.
Another factor holding back gains in workers’ income was the large increase in part-time work for economic reasons, that workers who do not want or need to work part time. These part-time workers jumped by 339,000 in October, or more than 7% in just one month. While this number comes from a separate survey of households (as opposed to the net new jobs coming from a survey of business), this suggests that at least some of the job gains were in part-time jobs.
Finally, more unemployed workers have been out of work more than six months. This reflects the “low hire, low fire” job market where job cuts are not rising, but the lack of hiring keeps people out of work longer. This holds back wage gains, as workers who switch jobs get bigger pay increases than those who stay on, and it puts more hardships on the unemployed as their insurance benefits run out after six months.