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hide captionShoppers make a purchase at an outlet mall in Los Angeles. Employers added 55,000 jobs in the retail sector in December.
Gus Ruelas/Reuters/Landov
Shoppers make a purchase at an outlet mall in Los Angeles. Employers added 55,000 jobs in the retail sector in December.
Gus Ruelas/Reuters/Landov
Whether you had a job or were looking for one, December was a gloomy month.
The Labor Department said Friday that for December, employers added only 74,000 jobs — about a third as many as most economists had been predicting. That was the lowest level of job creation in three years — not exactly the news that 10.4 million job seekers wanted to hear.
But even people who had paychecks got lumps of coal. Employers reduced the average workweek by 0.1 hours, down to 34.4 hours in December. And they increased workers' hourly pay by just 2 cents, to an average of $24.17. For the year, workers' wages were up 1.8 percent from 2012.
Even the apparent good news — a lower unemployment rate — was widely interpreted as bad. The jobless rate fell three-tenths of a point to 6.7 percent, marking the first time in 60 straight months that the rate was below 7 percent. But the rate slid in part because the country found itself with a smaller workforce as people retired or just dropped out.
In fact, for the month, 347,000 people walked away, edging down the labor force participation rate to just 62.8 percent — the lowest level since 1978.
Economists who had been expecting better results said snow and ice contributed to the troubles. "Cold weather played a bigger role in December's job weakness than I expected," PNC Financial's chief economist Stuart Hoffman wrote in an analysis. "I am not sure it will be any better in January if the arctic freeze persists."
The dreary jobs news came at a time when the White House is marking the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson's launch of the