Today Is the 30th Anniversary of the Most Amazing US Jobs Report of All Time
October 04, 2013
No September jobs report today, but oh to have been covering the economy when the September 1983 jobs report came out.
Back then, the BLS reported net new payrolls of 1,114,000. That’s right, over a million net new jobs in just one month. The Reagan Recovery was on.
That number is even more amazing when you consider the US labor force was a third smaller back then. The equivalent number of jobs today would be more like 1.6 million. In a single month. By contrast, analysts were looking for nonfarm payroll growth this month of around 180,000.
For all 1983, the US economy added 3.5 million new jobs, followed by 3.9 million in 1984.
Update: It has been noted that the September 1983 jobs number benefited roughly 640,000 AT&T workers returning from a strike. But even if you factor those jobs out, there were roughly 750,000 jobs created that month on a 2013 equivalent basis. Now that’s a jobs recovery!