U.S. Jobs Surged in January by 467,000
Friday, February 04, 2022
The United States added 467,000 jobs in January, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics released on Friday.
“Hiring was much stronger at the end of 2021 than originally reported, indicating businesses did a better job of recruiting workers to fill record openings even as omicron blitzed the economy,” reported MarketWatch.
“Economists polled by Wall Street had forecast 150,000 new jobs, but many investors were bracing for the first contraction in employment since December 2020 because so many workers got sick from omicron last month,” MarketWatch continued.
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“Why it matters,” Axios reports. “The new numbers show that there is sufficiently strong momentum in the job market, enough so to keep chugging along despite a public health crisis.”
They continue:
The details: It appears that the job creation resulted from employers keeping holiday workers on their payrolls who in a typical year would have been discharged in January. Categories with strong job growth included retail (+61,000) and transportation and warehousing (+54,000).
The big picture: The week on which the Labor Department data is based coincided with the peak of Omicron infections. And indeed, the report said that 6 million Americans were unable to work because their employer was closed due to the pandemic, up from 3.1 million in December.
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