To add to your analysis, we don’t know how many of these jobs were full time. Most were part-time, a result of Christmas seasonal hiring, as these are November numbers.
And let’s be frank—these numbers are statistically created—in other words, no one really knows if they are accurate or not.
In my view, the White Hut manipulates numbers unceasingly, and all I know is what I see out there—a GD depression.
Well we can get a glimpse of the NATURE of the job market from this -— the average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 34.6 hours in December.
The manufacturing workweek edged down by 0.1 hour to 41.0 hours, and factory overtime edged up by 0.1 hour to 3.6 hours. The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls edged up by 0.1 hour to 33.9 hours.
In December, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls decreased by 5 cents to $24.57, following an increase of 6 cents in November. Over the year, average hourly earnings have risen by 1.7 percent. In December, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees decreased by 6 cents to $20.68.
That’s a bit of a puzzle, and not a good one. Either the competition for jobs is still far too sharp to push wages up, or businesses are having to compensate for higher costs by delaying compensation increases.
According to the Household data, the US economy added an average of 231,000 jobs in 2014, well above the level needed to keep up with population growth but not exactly sufficient to make significant inroads into the ranks of the chronically unemployed. Those idled workers may be suppressing wage growth and making it difficult for workers to turn the market to their advantage. We will need higher levels of job creation to overcome that handicap, and so far we still are waiting for the real expansion in jobs to begin.