It's a big week for economic data. Here's what labor economists will be looking for.

August’s jobs report was surprisingly strong. It showed the economy added more than 162,000 jobs, up from just 21,000 in July, and 31,000 in June.

With a bunch of new jobs data coming out this week, Justin Wolfers from the University of Michigan will be looking for answers.

“The big question is: Was that a blip, or was that the data trying to tell us that things weren’t so bad?” Wolfers said. “The most important thing is not to overreact to any one number.”

We’re about to get a whole lot of economic data for August and September. When it comes to the labor market, we’ve got the job openings and labor turnover survey, or JOLTS, coming out tomorrow; ADP’s employment report follows on Wednesday; weekly unemployment data Thursday; and then to cap it all off on Friday, we’ll get September’s jobs report.

“There’s always volatility in the data,” said Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute. Shierholz said you want to look at the last several months together in order to draw any conclusions. “What we've seen recently is that the labor market is OK. There's good news and bad news,” she said.

The good news? The unemployment rate is low: It’s hovering just over 4%, and has been for a while.

“Job growth is solid, not great, but it's solid,” Shierholz explained. “Layoffs are low. So if you have a job, you are no more likely than usual to get laid off. So that is very good news,” she said.

The not-so-good news, according to Shierholz, is that wage growth is weak … and there’s not much hiring going on.

“We are talking now about hiring rates that are roughly where they were in, like, 2010, 2011, in the just unbelievably weak labor markets, right after the Great Recession,” she said.

You can see that in the growing number of people who are long-term unemployed — a number that Breyon Williams at the Groundwork Collaborative will be paying close attention to this week.

“We have right now more than a quarter of our unemployed workers that have been out of work and looking for work for six months or longer, and I think that that's a troubling sign,” Williams said.

It’s a sign of weakness in an otherwise fairly solid job market.