Biden sees ‘big progress’ as wages rise

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden said the September jobs report reflected “great progress” in getting the U.S. economy back on track after a year and a half of disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic, even as the total number of jobs was lower than expected.

“Today, for the first time since March 2020, the US unemployment rate is below 5%,” Biden said Friday in remarks to the White House after the Labor Department released the monthly figures for the job earlier in the day.

The unemployment rate in September fell to 4.8%, better than the 5.1% expected.

The president largely dismissed what was arguably the biggest takeaway from the September report for the markets: the fact that non-farm payrolls only increased by 194,000, compared to the estimate. Dow Jones of 500,000.

“The monthly totals are rebounding,” Biden said, “but if you look at the trend, it’s strong.”

The president also drew attention to the sharp increase in salaries. “American workers are also seeing their paycheques rise. In September, we saw one of the largest increases in average wages paid to American workers on record,” Biden said.

The 0.6% monthly wage gain pushed the year-over-year increase to 4.6%, with companies using the wage increases to tackle the lingering labor shortage.

Biden also touted the recent drop in long-term unemployment. This is partly explained by the post-pandemic return of workers in particularly affected sectors, such as hospitality and leisure.

“Over the past three months we have seen a drop of 1.3 million long-term unemployed. This is the biggest drop in three months in long-term unemployment since we started keeping records in 1948 “, did he declare. “More to do, but great progress.”

The jobs report comes as Biden faces the most difficult time in his presidency to date. He’s trying to get Congress to pass an ambitious economic agenda, while his approval ratings have dropped sharply on issues ranging from foreign policy to the economy to immigration.

A Quinnipiac University poll released this week found that only 39% of those polled approved of Biden’s handling of the economy, while 55% disapproved of it.

This has effectively been reversed since May, when a Gallup poll found that 57% of Americans had confidence in Biden’s management of the economy.

The September jobs report offered good news for Biden and the White House on two economic parameters that are particularly important to them: higher wages and lower unemployment.

While employers and business groups argue that the workforce-wide shortage of labor that forces them to offer higher wages poses a threat to the medium-term economic outlook country, Biden doesn’t see it that way.

Instead, he sees the higher wages as fulfilling the promises he made to voters in 2020.

“When it comes to the economy we are building, rising wages are not a bug, it’s a feature,” he said in a speech on the economy in May this year.

Yet despite Biden’s optimism about the employment numbers, the White House faces several major economic hurdles by the end of the year.

One is inflation, which continues to rise and which, according to studies, absorbs most of the wage gains of workers.

Supply chain disruptions are another problem, as they help boost inflation and pose a threat to the country’s long-term economic recovery.

In the aftermath of this week’s high-stakes debt ceiling negotiations, which ended in a short-term hike that was passed by the Senate on Thursday night, Congress will again face the prospect of default. payment around December 3.

Democrats hope that by then they will have passed their two-pronged national agenda bills, one to consolidate the country’s infrastructure and the other to extend the social safety net and l ‘adapt better to serve working families.

– CNBC’s Jeff Cox contributed to this report.