“I can say with greater confidence that a relapse into recession now looks even more unlikely,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group. “And the momentum is gradually building for a stronger fourth quarter and a better 2011.”

The Labor Department revised upward its private sector number for July, raising the number of jobs added to 107,000, from the 71,000 originally reported. And private sector hiring in June, originally reported at 83,000 and lowered to 31,000, was raised again to 61,000.

Mr. Baumohl, who also noted that consumer confidence had edged up in recent surveys and that a closely watched index of manufacturing showed earlier this week that employment was increasing, pointed to the fact that the jobs report showed that average weekly earnings rose slightly, to $774.97 in August from $772.92 in July.

The average workweek among private workers was unchanged at 34.2 hours, but among production and nonsupervisory employees, it edged up to 33.5 hours, from 33.4. Economists generally see such increases in pay and workweeks as an indicator that companies are pushing their existing workers harder to meet rising demand, moves that tend to presage hiring.

According to the government, manufacturing, which has been a bright spot since the beginning of the year and remains so in some other measures, showed a surprise setback in the government numbers released Friday.

For the first time since January, the sector lost jobs, a total of 27,000 in August. The Labor Department said the decline was in part attributable to the fact that carmakers did not shut down plants in July as they usually do, throwing off seasonal adjustments in August.

Thomas J. Duesterberg, the president of the Manufacturers Alliance-MAPI, said that the organization’s members were slowly adding workers. “It’s not the type of robust growth that we would all like to see and would need to see if we’re ever going to get back to the levels that we had before the recession,” Mr. Duesterberg said, “but nonetheless it’s growth.”