At the same time, the jobless rate fell to a near four-year low, but that was largely because so many Americans gave up the hunt for work.
Nonfarm employment increased by 146,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, defying expectations of a sharp pull back related to superstorm Sandy.
The government said the storm that slammed the densely populated East Coast had not had a substantive impact on last month’s employment and unemployment estimates.
The 0.2 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate to 7.7 percent — the lowest since December 2008 — represented a drop in both the labor force and employment as measured by a survey of households. Economists generally rely more heavily on the payrolls reading from the separate and much larger survey of employers.
While job gains for both September and October were revised to show 49,000 fewer jobs created than earlier reported, the revision was concentrated in the government sector.
Job gains have averaged 151,000 per month this year, just enough to push the jobless rate lower, but only slowly. Economists say roughly 200,000-250,000 jobs per month are needed to really make headway.
Employment continues to be held back by fears the government may fail to prevent the $600 billion in automatic tax hikes and government spending cuts set to take hold at the start of next year. The debt crisis in Europe has also weighed.
With the pace of job growth still too slow, November’s report is not expected to have much impact on Federal Reserve policymakers, who meet next Tuesday and Wednesday.
Relentless labor market weakness led the Fed in September to launch a program to buy $40 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities every month to drive down borrowing costs.
That is on top of a program dubbed “Operation Twist” in which it was re-weighting securities it holds toward longer maturities. Twist expires at the end of this month and economists expect the Fed to replace it with a program that buys government bonds with newly created money.
All of the meager jobs gains in November were in the private sector, with government employment slipping 1,000.
Within the vast private services sector, retail employment gained 52,600, professional and businesses services increased 43,000. Temporary help hiring increased 18,000.
In the goods-producing sector, manufacturing employment fell 7,000. Construction payrolls surprisingly dropped 20,000, despite a surge on homebuilding, which is benefiting from the Fed’s accommodative policy stance.
Sources: Reuters, The Jakarta Globe
Editor: DailyWeeks
Post a Comment