Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs in November

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Merry Christmas! The American economy added 321,000 new jobs last month, 90,000 of which were needed to keep up with population growth. This means that net job growth clocked in at 231,000 jobs, which is….pretty good, actually. And virtually all of it came from private sector job growth. We’re still not in full-tilt recovery mode, but this is a genuinely positive number. The unemployment rate stayed steady at 5.8 percent.

And there are no hidden gotchas in these results. The unemployment rate didn’t stay steady just because folks were dropping out of the labor force. All the employment-related numbers changed by similar amounts last month, and the labor force participation rate remained unchanged at 62.8 percent. If you insist on finding a downside to this month’s jobs report, perhaps it’s the fact that the unemployment rate spiked up a bit for workers with no high school diploma. But that’s as likely to be a statistical blip as anything else.

Hourly earnings for all workers rose at an annualized rate of about 4.3 percent, which isn’t bad, but earnings for nonsupervisory workers were up only 2.3 percent, which is roughly flat when you adjust for inflation. I generally pay more attention to the latter number, which means that wages still aren’t showing much energy. This is, as usual, unsettling. It suggests that even with the economy adding jobs, there’s still a fair amount of slack in the labor market.

Still, that’s a lagging indicator. If we can manage to keep up this level of job growth over the next year, wages will probably start to show some life. Needless to say, though, that’s a big if. The world economy is sailing into headwinds at the moment, and there’s no telling if the United States can buck the trend. Perhaps falling oil prices will give us the added push we need. Perhaps.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate