The Bureau of Labor Statistics
reported Friday a very strong gain in jobs for November. Seasonally adjusted, the economy added 314,000 new private-sector jobs. Another 7,000 new jobs were created in the public sector. It was the biggest gain since January 2012. It also made November the strongest jobs report of the year, and the 10th month of 2014 in which more than 200,000 new jobs were added.
Revisions in the November report raised the number of previously calculated new jobs in September from 256,000 to 271,000 and in October from 214,000 to 243,000. The bureau now says there are 1.54 million more jobs than there were at the pre-recession peak. More than 10 million new jobs have been created since the employment low point in February 2010.
The November headline unemployment rate, called U3 in BLS jargon, remained unchanged at 5.8 percent, the lowest since July 2008. U6—a BLS measure of unemployment and underemployment that includes people with no job at all, part-time workers who want full-time jobs but can't find one and many "discouraged" workers—fell 0.1 percent to 11.4 percent in November, having fallen 0.3 percent in October.
It's always good to remember the BLS caveat that "the monthly change in total nonfarm employment from the establishment survey is on the order of plus or minus 90,000." That means the "real" number of new jobs created in November wasn't 321,000, but, BLS statisticians calculate, somewhere in a band between 231,000 and 411,000. This is one of the reasons revisions in the two months following each report can be quite large.
By the bureau's count, 9.1 million people were officially out of work in November. This tally does not include the millions of workers who have left the workforce because they have given up on finding a job.
The employment-population ratio remained unchanged at 59.2 percent, the best it's been since July 2009. The labor force participation rate also remained unchanged at 62.8 percent. Only once in the past 36 years has the percentage been lower than that, which was in September this year. It peaked at 67.2 percent in April 2000. The civilian labor force increased by 119,000 after increasing by 416,000 in October.
In its totals for the month, the BLS doesn't distinguish between full-time and part-time jobs. Most recent hiring has been for full time jobs but only about one-third of those are high-wage positions. Middle-wage positions are still lagging. What that means is that, on average, people fortunate enough to take new jobs have found that they pay less than the ones lost in the Great Recession.
People counted as "part time for economic reasons" in November remained unchanged at 6.9 million. These workers want full-time jobs but have only been able to find part-time positions or have had their full-time hours reduced.
For more details about today's jobs report, please continue reading below the fold.
Some key elements in the report:
• The average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees rose 4 cents to $20.74.
• The manufacturing workweek rose 41.1 hours, and factory overtime rose 0.1 hour to 3.5 hours.
• The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls remained unchanged at 33.8 hours.
• Americans without a job for 27 weeks fell slightly to 2.8 million, 30.7 percent of the total unemployed.
Since the official end of recession in June 2009, the duration of unemployment remains at a very high 33 weeks, well above the average since the end of World War II. It peaked at 40.7 weeks in 2011.
Among other news in the November job report:
Demographic breakdown of official (U3) seasonally adjusted jobless rate:
• African American: 11.1 percent, up from 10.9 percent in October
• Latino: 6.6 percent, down from 6.8 percent
• Asian (not seasonally adjusted): 4.8 percent, down from 5.0 percent
• American Indian (data not collected on monthly basis)
• White: 4.9 percent, up from 4.8 percent
• Adult women (20 and older): 5.3 percent, down from 5.4 percent
• Adult Men (20 and older): 5.4 percent, up from 5.1 percent
• Teenagers (16-19): 17.7 percent, down form 18.6 percent
Duration of unemployment:
• Less than five weeks: 2.5 million, unchanged from October
• 5 to 14 weeks: 2.39 million, down from 2.5 million
• 15 to 26 weeks: 1.4 million, unchanged from October
• 27 weeks and more: 2.8 million, down from 2.9 million
Job gains and losses in selected categories:
• Professional services: + 86,000
• Transportation and warehousing : + 16,700
• Leisure & hospitality: + 32,000
• Information: + 4,000
• Health care: + 37,200
• Retail trade: + 50,200
• Construction: + 20,000
• Manufacturing: + 28,000
Hours and wages
• Average work week for all employees on non-farm payrolls was unchanged at 34.6 hours.
•Average hourly earnings for all employees on private non-farm payrolls rose 9 cents to $24.66
Here's what the seasonally adjusted job growth numbers have looked like in November for the previous 10 years.
November 2004: + 65,000
November 2005: + 337,000
November 2006: + 210,000
November 2007: + 118,000
November 2008: - 765,000
November 2009: - 6,000
November 2010: + 137,000
November 2011: + 164,000
November 2012: + 203,000
November 2013: + 274,000
November 2014: + 321,000
••• •••
The BLS jobs report is the product of a pair of surveys, one of more than 410,000 business establishments called Current Employment Statistics, and one called the Current Population Survey, which questions 60,000 householders each month. Here is the BLS's explanation of its methodology. The establishment survey determines how many new jobs were added. It is always calculated on a seasonally adjusted basis determined by a frequently tweaked formula. The BLS report only provides a snapshot of what's happening at a single point in time.
It's important to understand that the jobs-created-last-month-numbers that it reports are not "real." Not because of a conspiracy, but because statisticians apply formulas to the raw data, estimate the number of jobs created by the "birth" and "death" of businesses, and use other filters to fine-tune the numbers. And, always good to remember, in the fine print, they tell us, with a 90 percent confidence level, that the actual number of newly created jobs reported each falls within a plus or minus 90,000 range.