America’s private employers added fewer than 200,000 jobs in September, sharply undershooting market expectations and painting a picture of labor market recovery that’s on wobbly footing. The Labor Department’s jobs report, released Oct. 8, shows that non-farm payroll employment rose by a paltry 194,000 last month, down from last month’s upwardly revised 366,000 and far below the FactSet-provided consensus forecasts of 500,000. “The latest snapshot of the job market is a bit of a bad news, good news affair,” Bankrate senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick said in an emailed statement to The Epoch Times. “It delivered a surprisingly weak payrolls number,” Hamrick said, adding, “at the same time, the nation’s unemployment rate slipped four-tenths to a pandemic era low of 4.8 percent.” The total number of unemployed persons fell by 710,000 to 7.7 million, the report showed. While that’s considerably lower than the pandemic-era high, it remains elevated compared to the 5.7 million …