The economy added 148,000 jobs in December after a year of steady hiring, missing expectations for a larger surge of growth, the government reported Friday.
The jobless rate stayed at 4.1 percent last month, the lowest point since 2001, with health care and professional services driving much of the past year's gains.
Wages, meanwhile, continued their slow climb, rising by 9 cents. That’s a 2.5 percent increase since December 2016 (and still below pre-recession levels).
“It’s certainly disappointing, but we’re still topping off a strong year for job creation, said Mike Loewengart, vice of president of investment strategy at E*TRADE, a financial services company in New York.
Retail lost 20,000 jobs in December, according to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, capping a year of shrinkage in the sector. About 67,000 positions vanished from stores in 2017, compared to the stretch of growth (203,000 jobs) in 2016.That’s a notoriously volatile number around the holiday season, but it also reflects in part that increasing number of sales are coming from e-commerce and not brick and mortar stores,” said David Berson, chief economist at Nationwide. “That’s part of a longer term decline in that sector.”
Manufacturing, though, saw strong gains (25,000). The industry added 196,000 jobs last year, compared to a loss of 16,000 positions in 2016.
Friday's numbers on the broader economy missed expectations — analysts had predicted between 200,000 and 250,000 new positions — but they still send a promising message to job seekers: Employers will be increasingly desperate for your applications in 2018.
“There’s almost one job open for every unemployed person,” said Dan North, chief economist at Euler Hermes North America, a credit insurance firm.There are now six million vacancies in the United States and 6.6 million unemployed people, to be more precise. From January to November, the economy added 1.9 million jobs.
However, companies nationwide keep struggling to fill roles, citing tight labor markets, retiring baby boomers and failed drug tests. Factories, hospitals, contractors and eateries, among other employers, face this trouble.
“Restaurants are finding it extremely challenging to find workers,” Sonia Riggs, president and chief executive of the Colorado Restaurant Association, said in an email. “Many have even eliminated drug testing because finding employees is so difficult.”
Employers increasingly are turning to on-the-job training to find and retain employees — but that could be keeping wages downIn manufacturing and metals, especially, employers have been saying to me, ‘I could grow faster if I could find somebody, anybody,' ” said North, the economist. “They’ll hire whoever they can find, pay them a low wage and train them up.”
Though last year brought what economists see as healthy job growth, it was still below 2016. The average number of jobs employers added each month in 2017 was 173,000, compared to the previous year’s 187,000.
On Friday, the government unveiled its estimate for the year: 2.1 million new jobs arrived in 2017, a slight drop from 2.2 million in 2016.
The U.S. jobless rate dropped faster in 2017, though, and it’s expected to keep shrinking. Roughly 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 each day, and not enough young workers are cycling in to replace them
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