This is the highest the unemployment rate has been ahead of a presidential election since the government started tracking the monthly rate in 1948.
The October jobs report will be published on the Friday following the election.
Comparing presidents’ jobs records in the first 44 months in office over the same time period, Tump comes last.
Between January 2017 and September, 3.9 million jobs were lost.
President George W. Bush lost jobs during his first term in office following the recession that came after the dot-com bubble burst. In the first 44 months of the Bush administration, 605,000 jobs were lost. During Bush’s total time in office, however, jobs were added.
Government records of monthly jobs numbers go back to 1939, the middle of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.
America’s jobs recovery is to be running out of steam. After adding back more than a million jobs every month between May and August, job growth slowed down last month.
That’s especially bad news as the country is still down 10.7 million jobs since February, before Covid-19 hit.
One of the reasons that fewer positions were added last month is the government itself: Over the past months, the Census Bureau had been hiring temporary workers for this year’s count, adding as many as 238,000 workers between July and August alone. But in September, Census employment shrank by 41,000 jobs.
Meanwhile, some companies have announced large-scale layoffs, which will be a drag on the recovery in coming months. Disney and American Airlines both announced layoffs this week — 28,000 and 19,000 workers, respectively.
This is a developing story. It will be updated
source: cnn.com
