Employers added a mere 142,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said on Friday, suggesting that the American economy is losing momentum after a similarly lackluster report for the previous month.
The official unemployment rate held steady at 5.1 percent, but hourly wages for private sector workers actually fell slightly after jumping by a relatively robust 0.4 percent in August.
The employment report for August was revised sharply downward, showing the economy created only 136,000 jobs, well below the 173,000 originally estimated.
Friday's report came just two weeks after the Federal Reserve decided that the recovery was still too frail to risk lifting interest rates from their near-zero level. The latest evidence of a weakening economy may push any rate increase into next year even though the Fed chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, had previously suggested that the central bank was likely to go ahead with a rate increase before year's end.
"There's nothing good in this morning's report," said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust in Chicago. "We had very low levels of job creation, wage growth isn't budging, and the unemployment rate would have risen if the labor force participation rate hadn't fallen."
Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor Economic Research, agreed. "Unfortunately today's report will not give much reassurance to Fed policy makers," he said.
Other reports suggest that while the overall American economy remains sturdy, it has lost steam on several fronts in recent months. The manufacturing sector has been hit by the strong dollar and weak global demand; the oil industry has cut back sharply on investment in response to low prices; and farming has taken a hit because of slumping commodity prices.
The American economy now appears to be importing some of the global economic malaise. "Although the jobs market has been resilient recently," Mr. Chamberlain said, "it's starting to show the impact of slowing growth in Europe and China."
He noted the biggest losers were in mining, logging and manufacturing, while health care, the leisure and hospitality and professional and business services industries remained strong. There were also 24,000 new government jobs created.
Although the unemployment rate held steady, the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.4 percent, from 62.6 percent.
With Friday's revision, job gains have averaged just 167,000 a month for the last three months.
Looking at the feeble yearly rise in median wages, Mr. Chamberlain said such figures mask a huge disparity among industries. Referring to data from the summer, he said that workers in the financial services, construction and graphic design sectors saw hefty double-digit wage growth from the previous year. Those suffering some of the steepest wage declines included those in the manufacturing (down more than 12 percent since last year), retail clothing and textile industries.
Yet even in manufacturing, skilled workers are at an advantage. Jeff Owens, president of Advanced Technology Services, a manufacturing consulting company based in Peoria, Ill., said he would like to add about 160 workers to his 3,300-person staff.
"Where we're struggling is in the area of talented people in manufacturing," he said, mentioning managers and skilled electricians, information technology workers and machinists.
The outlook is much worse for those in the low-skill corners of the economy.
When Will the Fed Raise Rates?
"We're still finding a lot of skilled jobs come open, but it's certainly slowed down for the unskilled," said Robert A. Funk, chairman and chief executive of Express Employment Professionals, a staffing agency based in Oklahoma City with 750 offices.
To Mr. Funk, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the anemic labor force participation rates, which have continued to scrape along at record levels, is further evidence that many of these workers have given up looking for work.
"I believe the economy slowed down a little bit in the last six weeks or so," he said. He said his agency has observed the biggest drop-off in the oil-drilling states including Texas, Oklahoma, and North and South Dakota.
Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a Chicago staffing firm, has also noticed a recent wariness among employers, who have been unsettled by the Fed's uncertainty as well as changes in regulations governing overtime exemptions and compensation. "What I'm seeing with companies is that they're taking a little bit longer to hire," he said. "Companies are just trying to figure how it's all going to play out."
He added: "I think it's a good healthy job market, but it's just not as robust as people want it to be. I don't think it gets better."
Others fear that economy is not going to deliver many gains to workers who have been waiting years to receive any bounty from the improvements in growth. .
William Spriggs, chief economist for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, "We've pretty much reached a kind of stability, and the unemployment rate will continue to fall mostly because of retirements."
An analysis this week from Morgan Stanley noted that the decline in the unemployment rate to 5.1 percent in August, from 5.5 percent in May, was entirely attributable to a drop in the labor force participation rate. Indeed, the percentage of the working-age population that is employed — which some economists consider a bellwether of how the economy is performing — has for most of this year stayed flat at under 60 percent, significantly below its prerecession levels.
Although the number of people applying for unemployment insurance this week inched up, the four-week moving average — considered a better measure of labor market trends — dipped slightly to 271,000 from the 283,000 average that has prevailed during the first eight months of the year.
This week, the payroll processor ADP, which monitors only private businesses, reported a gain of 200,000 new jobs in September.
While public-sector jobs did pick up in August, thanks to hiring by local governments, the generally languorous recovery in that sector continued to keep the employment numbers down, said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented research organization in Washington.
Add in the normal growth that would be needed to keep pace with an expanding population, Ms. Gould said, and there are 1.7 million fewer jobs in the public sector than before the start of the recession.
"I think that the unemployment rate is not accurately providing a picture of the amount of slack in the labor market," Ms. Gould said.
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the economy. It is heading into the final quarter of 2015, of course — not 2016.
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