The September Monthly Employment Situation Report was a head-scratcher. The non-seasonally adjusted data revealed that there was a surge of over 1 million part-time jobs, a drop in the unemployment rate, and an increase in participation. It also revealed an above average drop in the number of workers in the workforce. "Sept. Jobs Up, Workers Down" goes into further detail. The article "Five Presidents after Eight Months: Trumponomics" examined the Current Population Survey Data (CPS) and found that President  Trump has seen the addition of over 4 million full-time jobs and a reduction of over 1.5 million unemployed workers during his first 8 months in office. He has added more participants than Presidents Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush , or Obama. How did we add jobs and lose workers? We saw a spike in multiple job workers.

The Number of Multiple Job Worker exceeded 7.3 million this month. This was an increase from the 6.961 million non-seasonally adjusted dual job workers from last month. This means that of the one million new part-time jobs added that roughly 400,000 of those jobs went to people who already had a job. The number of FT PT workers increased by 300,000 while the number of people working two part-time jobs increased by 200,000. There is an anamoly in the data where the total of those working two part-time jobs, two full-time jobs, or a primary FT job and a secondary Part-time job do not equal the total number of multiple job workers. The remainder have a "primary" part-time job with a "secondary" Full-time job.  We saw a near record level of people working two part-time jobs last month with over 2 million people working two part-time jobs.

We had been seeing year over year increases in multiple job workers for the past four years. This year we saw across the board declines in the number of people working multiple jobs, and the year over year decline is significant. Jobs have been increasing. Workers have been increasing. There has been a "historic surge" in full-time jobs since February. While there was s surge month to month in the number of people working a primary full-time job and a secondary part-time job, there was a decline in the number of people working a primary part-time and secondary full-time job. The surge is not being reported in the media because the surge is not being reported in the report, only the data.

There are many ways to examine the data. This column, an, analyze the data, not the reported to last year? How is President Trump doing compared to his predecessors? Are we harder or smarter? Where are the jobs being created or lost? Have we recovered from the Great Recession? The next article will examine the sector data. Hint: Leisure and Hospitality jobs declined during September and Government Jobs increased this past month.

It's the economy.