The refrain seems to be that because we had set a record for consecutive 200k+ monthly jobs gains, anything less than this immediately means we are sliding into recession. It is almost as if we now think economic data does not ebb and flow and one or two month’s numbers are a “new trend” (and that trend immediately goes from record results to recession). Of course we ignore record auto sales, retail sales, strengthening construction  etc etc and focus on the one number that isn’t where we want it to be.

The basic point is that we still added 142k jobs (1st read). We also should note that the last three years saw September’s number revised UP from between 18k to 27k jobs.  Further, ~3MM more people are working today than they were at this time last year (and they are getting paid more) and there is one other labor market anomaly to think about, the changing US worker is increasingly not being counted in official labor statistics:

US News

But that total is well shy of a projection made earlier this week in an MBO Partners independent labor report, which estimates the domestic economy holds 30.2 million independent workers who are at least 21 years old. The country’s independent workforce has ballooned 12 percent in the last five years alone, according to the report – which dwarf’s the overall labor market’s 2 percent growth over the same period.

“Over the past year, independent workers generated more than $1.15 trillion of revenue. That sum, equal to nearly 7 percent of U.S. GDP, was up 5.8 percent from 2014 and is 26 percent higher than the 2011 total,” the report said. “The independent workforce is growing at a rate that is more than four times greater [than] the growth rate of the overall workforce.”

The discrepancy in the two projections is partly because the Labor Department counts self-employed workers whose businesses are incorporated – or legally distinguished as free-standing corporate entities – as standard wage and salary workers. And full-time employees who do consulting or freelancing work on the side are often skipped over in the tallying of self-employed labor each month.

This means thousands of temporary employees and freelancers aren’t technically counted as self-employed in the Labor Department’s calculations. It also means the health of the country’s freelance economy can potentially be undervalued.