October Jobs Report Shows Hiring Slowed Amid Storms and Strikes

Job creation stalled in October, a month battered by strikes and hurricanes, presenting an unclear picture of where the labor market was headed even as overall economic growth remained impressive.

Employers added only 12,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, substantially fewer than economists had forecast. The unemployment rate, based on a survey of households, remained 4.1 percent.

The report is the last before a presidential election in which polls have consistently found the economy to be a top issue for voters, and the low figure supplied a talking point for Republicans. It also strengthened the case for another interest rate cut when Federal Reserve policymakers meet next week.

“It’s hard to say, ‘This was a strong report if it were not for the strikes and hurricanes,’” said Oliver Allen, a senior U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “If the numbers still look like that next month, and we have another step down in revisions, it’s a pretty weak set of prints.”

Gains for August and September were revised downward, bringing the three-month average to 104,000 — down from 189,000 over the six months before that.

Markets took the muddled data in stride, but the political reaction was fierce, with former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign saying the report was “a catastrophe and definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy.”