The January jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed continued health in new jobs created, despite the spiking Omicron variant. Some 467,000 new jobs were created in January, but equally important was the upward revision of jobs gains for December and November: November from 249,000 to 647,000 and December from 199,000 to 510,000. According to Drew Matus of MetLife Investment Management:
“There’s all kind of good news [and it] suggests people are getting back to normal. In the big picture, it’s a very encouraging report. People returning to the workforce is what you wanted to see, and the gains were pretty widespread across different groups. The most important thing is people want to get back to work and they’re trying to get back to work.”
Another gain posted in the January report was an increase in average hourly earnings by 23 cents, up 5.7 percent from last year, but with the caution that inflation is eating into those hourly earnings.
It's excellent economic news which will likely be ignored by the Beltway media and Republican-wired economists, whose predictions of a slide were dramatically wrong:
"The report blew expectations out of the water. The consensus forecast had been for only 150,000 jobs. Plenty of economists even expected job losses, warning that business closures and worker absenteeism in jobs without sick leave could lead to people being counted as unemployed. A similar dynamic played out last winter, when rising infections temporarily weighed on the jobs recovery in December 2020."
For them, bad news is good news.
BONUS: Something is going on with the low- ball numbers coming out of BLS (Trumpist saboteurs?)--
Great chart from @andrewvandam showing how huge the revisions have been on the monthly jobs reports, and how without them we'd see a picture of largely steady growth pic.twitter.com/4MhAj8eYPJ
— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) February 4, 2022
this is the big story here. The last two months were huge too. Basically the BLS seems to have been taken over by the RNC. https://t.co/Q0IGGZFOO0
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 4, 2022
