The jobs report released last week came in right about where we expected it to in January. And the news was good: more jobs and lower unemployment.
But every month when we get new job numbers, we also get revisions for the previous months. And those were a bit more surprising. Turns out, we added 100,000 more jobs in November and December than we originally thought.
Revisions are normal, but economist Cory Stahle with Indeed.com said there’s another reason this one was so big.
“Revisions tend to be more common when there are shocks or kind of climate disruptions that impact the data collection,” he said.
Hurricane Milton devastated the Gulf Coast in October of last year. “And as a result, you know, the jobs numbers were hit there. But also I would imagine some of the reporting in the following months was also impacted, as well,” Stahle said.
So it sounds like good news — there are 100,000 more jobs added than previously thought.
But “I’m not seeing at the macro level, things to suggest that the labor market is accelerating,” said Pavlina Tcherneva, president of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College.
She isn’t ready to call it a turnaround. “We knew that the labor market was slowing down, and so a couple of months of positive news doesn’t seem to show a turnaround in trend.”
Tcherneva said long-term trends still tell the same story. The percentage of people in the labor force has been stagnant in 2024, and in the past two years, the number of people staying unemployed for at least six months has gone up.
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