December’s cold, and so are its employment numbers
The first Friday of the month is already upon us, and it’s brought bad news. Payroll employment in the country is up 18,000 positions, which…in the grand scheme of things…sort of amounts to nothing. I am happy to say that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics isn’t reporting a loss for December, but a number this small isn’t much better.
One number that did make a big move last month? The national unemployment rate, which has jumped from 4.7 percent to 5.0 percent between the end of November and now. The unemployed population increased by 474,000 persons in December, bringing the total number of unemployed workers in the U.S. to 7.7 million (versus 6.8 million a year ago).
There’s no need to dwell on these less-than-impressive numbers, so let’s divert our attention to the industry overviews. No big surprises here. A few notable gains and losses include:
Professional & technical services: +33,000 jobs
Health care: +28,000 jobs
Food services: +27,000 jobs
*Note that the health care sector and the food services industry combined to equal about 2/3 of all the private sector job growth in 2007.
Construction: -49,000 jobs
Manufacturing: -31,000 jobs
Retail trade: -24,000 jobs
As you see, construction and manufacturing had a pretty rough month, and these large losses offset gains in the service industries. The workweek remained unchanged at 33.8 hours, and a seven-cent rise in the average hourly earnings of U.S. workers (which follows an eight-cent rise in November) reveals that worries about inflation are not far off.
Sorry to be a such a downer on a Friday afternoon, but there weren’t too many positives to be found in the BLS report for December. My career advice would be to stick to the service fields when exploring degree options in the new year.