"Four Things to Know Before the Jobs Report"

From Real Time Economics:

For those of you prepping for Friday’s Labor Department report on November employment, here are four things to remember:

1. The job market is picking up, but let’s not get carried away: What we’ve seen for years now is slow, steady improvement. Economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires expect Friday’s report to show employers adding 180,000 jobs in November, close to October’s impressive 204,000 figure — which was the third straight month of encouraging payroll numbers. Unemployment is expected to fall to 7.2% after edging up to 7.3% in October due to government shutdown-related factors.

Clearly, the jobs picture is better than earlier this year: Job growth has averaged about 200,000 a month for the past three months; first-time jobless insurance claims — a measure of layoffs — are falling and around prerecession levels; and workers’ wages are now rising, hinting at competition between employers for workers, at least in some areas. Other reports have pointed to strong private-sector hiring and fewer unemployed people per job opening. But it’s important to place these improvements in context.

Since the economy started adding jobs three years ago, monthly job gains have averaged about 180,000, which is right around what we’re seeing now. There are still 11.3 million unemployed people, 8.1 million doing part-time work because they can’t find full-time employment and 4.1 million who’ve been jobless for six months or more. Participation in the labor market — people working or seeking work — is around 35-year lows. While the recession ended four and a half years ago, we’re still 1.5 million jobs short of what we had when the recession hit. And it’s not clear employers are in the hiring mood: A survey of CEOs by the Business Roundtable found executives were barely more willing to hire than a few months ago.

2. It’s not just about jobs — it’s about how much those jobs pay. The jobs recovery has been uneven, with many people locked outside of it. To give you a sense, over the past year, the economy has added just 55,000 manufacturing jobs, roughly 0.5% of the current total of about 12 million manufacturing jobs. By contrast, retail, professional-and-business-services (a category that includes temp workers) and leisure and hospitality (which includes restaurants and hotels) have added, respectively, 368,000, 644,000 and 444,000 jobs. In fact, there are more professional-and-business service jobs and more leisure and hospitality jobs now than there were before the recession....MORE