Where The December Jobs Were: Nurses, Waiters, And Waste Cleaners

Something remains very broken with the US labor market: while the unemployment rate remains just shy of the lowest print since August 2007, rising fractionally to 4.7%, wage growth for most workers, as reported earlier, rose just 2.5%, far below the 4.0% it was when the unemployment rate last hit 4.7%.
This continues to vex economists who have vowed that if only one lowers the unemployment rate far enough, all the slack in the labor market will be soaked up. Alas, that is not happening, for several reasons, the chief of which is that the quality of jobs added remains subpar, with wage growth – especially for less than “supervisory” and management positions – flat.
Still, according to the BLS at least, some 155,000 seasonally adjusted jobs were added in December, arbitrarily goalseeked as they may have been. Where were they? Here is the answer: The most actively hiring sector was health care, which saw a whopping 70,000 increase in December jobs, nearly half of total. Most of the increase occured in ambulatory health care services ( 30,000) and hospitals ( 11,000). Social assistance added 20,000 jobs in December, reflecting job growth in individual and family services ( 21,000). Professional and Busines Services rose by a total of 30,500, the second highest gaining category. here the biggest contributor was Administrative and Waste Services to Buildings and Dwellings, which rose by 10,600.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jan 6, 2017.