NPR It's Jumps Friday. That's right. Once a month we put aside the stock market.

Who cares?

We put aside all the other indicators, never heard of them.

And we check in on how the workers of America are doing.

Yeah, about two-thirds of all American adults are in the labor force.

And in September, 254,000 jobs were added to the US economy.

It's an unexpectedly strong month.

The unemployment rate ticked down very slightly to 4.1%. It's relieving news for workers after a pretty

lacklustre summer. We are at this critical moment in the economy.

Unemployment in America is like being on a sheet of ice.

After a few cracks, the sheet collapses.

And a lot of people lose their jobs really fast.

And then it's usually a long slow steady struggle over years to get everyone

back out of the icy waters of unemployment. That has been the historic pattern for almost every recession over the past 70 years.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Wailen Wong.

And I'm Darren Blyds.

Today on the show, Unemployment on Thin Ice, how it's easier to break the economy than to fix it, and

whether we can escape from the patterns of the past. Last.

One year ago, the event that changed a region.

Heavily armed Palestinian militants in Gaza flew across the border.

The October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel.

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