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Employers added a mere 142,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department announced Friday, suggesting that the U.S. economy is losing momentum after a second month of lackluster growth.

The news comes two weeks after the Federal Reserve decided the recovery was still too frail to risk lifting interest rates from their near-zero level.

The New York Times reports:

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. …

“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.

Read more here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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#economic recovery#economy#employment#jobs#labor department#obama administration#unemployment