Good News on Employment at Last

On January 6 the BLS gave us the best news on employment growth we’ve had in years. They said that nonfarm payroll employment rose by 200,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis from November to December. That brought the total gain in such jobs during 2011 to a total of 1,640,000.

This number will probably be revised upward when the data for January 2012 are released on February 3. That’s because those data will be revised in the annual benchmarking of the payroll data to the comprehensive job counts done every March.

On September 29, 2011, the BLS reported this revision for March 2011 was likely to be an increase of 192,000 jobs from what is currently shown. Some 140,000 of these were in the private sector, mostly in the “Trade, transportation and Utilities” and the “Professional and business services” categories. There was an increase of 52,000 jobs in the government sector.

Total employment grew by 1,570,000 people during the course of 2011. The unemployment rate was 9.1 percent (as revised) in January, June, July and August, all on a seasonally adjusted basis. That fell to 8.5 percent in December, the lowest since the 8.3 percent of February 2009.

The news was particularly good for college graduates age 25 and over. There were 47,131,000 of us in the civilian labor force in December, which gave us a labor force participation rate of 76.0 percent, far above the average of 64.0 percent.
A full 45,201,000 of us were employed and only 1,930,000 were unemployed. That resulted in an unemployment rate of 4.1 percent.

More good news from the BLS came in the JOLTS report of November, which was released on January 10. That showed there were 3.2 million job openings on a seasonally adjusted basis at the end of November.

For the 12 months ending in November, some 48.6 million hires were made. There were 47.2 million separations. Thus, there were 95.8 million hiring and separating decisions made to get a net increase of 1,400,000 nonfarm payroll jobs.

There has never been another labor market so dynamic as that of the United States. My expectation, as described in the article about my employment outlook in the December 7 issue of Business Week is that the pace of employment creation will pick up a lot in 2012.

We could easily see over 3.0 million net new nonfarm payroll jobs created this year. It should be fun to watch the employment news throughout 2012–a welcome change.