The October jobs report was a doozy: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy actually added some 114,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. Which actually isn’t much. But somehow, it was enough to cause the official unemployment number – the number we usually think of as the unemployment number – to fall from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent.

Why? Because while nonfarm payrolls came in right at forecast – boding no change in the unemployment rate at all, the household survey, a telephonic poll, indicated that employment increased some 873,000.

This was extremely welcome news for the Obama campaign, which needed something – anything – to distract attention from the President’s disastrous debate appearance against GOP candidate Mitt Romney. And it should be welcome news for anyone who cares about the economy and American workers.

But the report was also met with skepticism: How could such a modest jobs increase cause such a huge drop in the unemployment rate? It makes no sense.

The idea that the economy suddenly sprouted nearly a million jobs for no particular reason doesn’t pass the smell test. The disconnect was too big to explain away: The work force increased by 418,000, the number of employed jumped by 873,000, while the ranks of the unemployed fell by 456,000.

Try to figure that one out!

All told, average monthly job growth has actually been lower in 2012 than it was in 2011 – 143,000 per month this year, compared to 152,000 last year. The number of new jobs it takes to maintain equilibrium with the increasing population – new graduates, immigrants, etc., is closer to 200,000 per month, so we’re not even treading water at this point – and hiring has been slower, not faster, on a year-over-year basis.

Furthermore, an economy growing at 2 percent per year should generate about 150,000 jobs per month. A survey indicating an 873,000 job increase suggests and economy growing at 5 or 6 percent. Implausible.

I don’t believe the economy created 873,000 real, quality, full-time jobs for a second. If it wasn’t a bad sampling, it probably reflects the fact that companies across the country are reacting to ObamaCare by slashing their full-time workers and replacing full-time jobs with two part-time jobs. That creates more jobs, McJobs, anyway, but does nothing to advance the interests of workers looking to raise families, pay off student loans, and buy new houses and cars, which is what it would take to rejuvenate our flagging manufacturing and housing industries. $8 per hour jobs are not going to make a middle class – no matter how many of them we create. Manufacturing, meanwhile, hemorrhaged 16,000 jobs.

The best thing about the report, though, was the increase in the labor force participation rate. Recently, we’ve had a trend of weak jobs reports, but because the unemployment percentage doesn’t count ‘discouraged workers,’ the sheer numbers of individuals giving up on finding employment has perversely worked to decrease unemployment percentage. If you add back discouraged workers into the pool, the real unemployment rate is over 22 percent.

This last report reversed the trend – the labor force participation rate bumped to 63.6 percent. So at least some people have gotten up off the couch and gone back to work.

I’m not the only one suspicious of the job numbers. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric and a man who knows a thing or two about the economy, is calling foul – accusing the Obama Administration’s Labor Department of manipulating the numbers to make the President look good right before the election.

I’m not too sure about that. We know the New York Times isn’t above that. But most career folks in the middle ranks of federal service take more pride in their work than that. If political appointees were cooking the books, it wouldn’t take long before some of the worker bees were blowing the whistle.

Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics generally massages the numbers beyond all recognition. There are valid reasons for this, but consider this point from Forbes:

Because the sample of households is small relative to the total number of households, the series is notoriously volatile. In August, for example, the raw data (Not Seasonally Adjusted (NSA)) showed the number of jobs fell by 568,000. In September, that same number showed an increase of 775,000 jobs (NSA). The BLS reported this as 873,000 SA which is the number that the media got all excited about. Using the NSA data, over the two months, 207,000 jobs were created, or 103,500 per month on average. This leads to a very different conclusion from a single 873,000 data point.

The bottom line – while the increase in the labor force participation rate is welcome news, it’s also precisely what you would expect as employers dump full-time workers to dodge the ObamaCare mandate and replace them with full-time workers. Indeed, it is just as we predicted in this column from earlier this year.

Note: I originally planned to include something about the exclusion of at least part of California’s data, but I’m not convinced there’s that much too that at this point. Feel free to convince me in the comments!

New jobs in Vitaver’s CAREERS section daily!