Concerns over US jobs market ease

US employers hired more staff than forecast in September, job gains were revised up in the prior two months and hours and earnings increased, helping ease concerns the country's labour market is deteriorating.

The workforce climbed by 103,000  after a revised 57,000 increase the prior month that was more than originally estimated, Labor Department data showed today in Washington. The median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey called for a rise of 60,000.

The gain reflected the return to work of 45,000 telecommunications employees. The jobless rate held at 9.1 per cent.

Faster job growth is a sign employers remain confident the US will avoid a renewed slump, even as unemployment is forecast to remain above 8 per cent through 2013. The risk that the world's largest economy may fall back into a recession has prompted the Federal Reserve and US president Barack Obama to announce further measures to sustain the expansion.

"We are in a slow-growth recovery," Patrick O'Keefe, director of economist research at JH Cohn LLP in Roseland, New Jersey, said before the report. "We are not losing ground but we are not making inroads into the extraordinarily high level of unemployment."

Estimates of the 91 economists surveyed by Bloomberg from a decline in the workforce of 50,000 to a 115,000 increase. The unemployment rate was projected to hold at 9.1 per cent, according to the survey median.

Unemployment has exceeded 8 per cent since February 2009, the longest stretch of such elevated joblessness since monthly records began in 1948.

Private employment, which excludes government jobs, rose 137,000 after a gain of 32,000 in the prior month, the Labor Department said.

The share of the eligible population holding a job rose to 58.3 per cent from 58.2 per cent. Government staff numbers decreased by 34,000 in September. Employment at state governments rose by 2,000 last month while local government employment slumped 35,000.

Employment at service-providers increased 85,000 in September, the most since April. Construction employment climbed 26,000 last month, the biggest gain since February and led by a jump in non-residential building employment.

Average hourly earnings rose 0.2 per cent to $23.12, today's report showed. The average work week for all workers climbed six minutes to 34.3 hours.

The so-called underemployment rate - which includes part-time workers who would prefer a full-time position and people who want work but have given up looking - increased to 16.5 per cent, the highest this year, from 16.2 per cent.

The number of Americans working part-time for "economic reasons" jumped 444,000 to 9.3 million.

Through August, the economy had recovered about 1.9 million of the 8.75 million jobs lost as a result of the 18-month recession that ended in June 2009.

Sustained increases of around 200,000 a month are needed to bring unemployment down about a percentage point over a year, according to Eric Green, chief market economist at TD Securities in New York.

The economy expanded at a 1.3 per cent pace in the second quarter following a 0.4 per cent gain in the first three months of the year, the weakest performance in two years, the Commerce Department reported last week.

Consumer spending grew 0.7 per cent, the least since the last three months of 2009.

Bloomberg