The American economy gained 263,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 173,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate remained at 3.7%.
As usual these days, the biggest gains were in leisure and hospitality. The biggest losses were in retail (remember that this data is seasonally adjusted, so holiday season hiring is already accounted for). Transportation and trucking were down yet again, a worrisome trend.
Overall this is a respectable report, but the bad news is that although unemployment went down a little, so did employment. That's better than last month, when employment went down a lot and unemployment went up, but in both cases it's mostly arithmetic keeping the headline unemployment number down, not a robust economy. Here's the employment level:
This measures something a little different than the jobs report, but they're still comparable when you look at month-to-month changes. As you can see, the employment level has been dead flat since March and was down 138,000 compared to last month.
In earnings news, blue-collar wages were up 4.3% on an annualized basis. Adjusted for inflation this comes out to -1.1%.
Different views of the same object?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/02/jobs-report-november-2022.html
From the source:
If we had a Republican president this would be a gangbusters employment report showing that America is BACK BABY!!
Here are the overall employment numbers:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm
Per households it would appear that fewer Americans were working in November than in October, despite what payroll managers told the government. I'm not sure which is more trustworthy, though as Kevin mentions, the two tend to converge with time.
BLS at KD’s link: “With these revisions, employment gains in September and October combined were 23,000 lower than previously reported.”
Always interesting to look at revisions for prior months; one sees that initial reports can reflect significant error components. Revisions usually reflect late reporting, but also changes in seasonal adjustments.
September and October corrected numbers are +269,000 and +284,000, so good numbers still.
I assume this is all yet more bad news for Biden, somehow?
Well of course. Just ask Politico or Chuck Todd. Actually every single media outlet holds Democrats to a much higher standard then Republicans. So tiring. Got to make sure the Democrats doing a great job is reported as just okay. Why? artificially equalizing the two parties.