Thread by @bencasselman

U.S. employers added 155k jobs in November, the 98th straight month of growth. The unemployment rate held at 3.7%, a multi-decade low. #jobsday
nytimes.com/2018/12/07/bus…

Average earnings up 6 cents/hour, 3.1% over the past year. That's the same year-over-year rate as last month, when wage growth was supposedly artificially inflated by hurricane effects.

October's strong number was revised down a bit, but September up very slightly. Net downward revision of 12k.

Solid household survey: Employment up 233k, unemployment down 100k, labor force up 133k. (Participation rate unchanged after last month's uptick.)

Lots of talk about manufacturing slowdown given GM, tariff concerns, etc. But no sign of that in jobs report: +27k manufacturing jobs in November, continuing strong run. (Slight decline in auto manufacturing jobs, though.)

There has now been a clear acceleration in the rate of wage growth -- over 3% year-over-year for both all workers and non-supervisors. (Of course, inflation also up over last year.)

Slight slowdown in the year-over-year pace of job growth, but the real message here is the remarkable consistency of hiring over the past six years.

Number of people working part-time because they can't find full-time work ticked back up again in November. May be just a blip, but worth watching, as @marthagimbel has been saying for several months now. Still elevated vs prerecession level.

@marthagimbel Prime-age employment-population ratio held steady at 79.7, the highest since 2008. (Still well below 2000 peak, though.)

@marthagimbel More evidence the recovery is reaching the most vulnerable: The unemployment rate for Americans with just a high school diploma (or GED) was 3.5% in November, the lowest since 2000.

@marthagimbel Similarly, unemployment rate among African Americans fell back to its all-time low (first hit in May) of 5.9%.

@marthagimbel Worth noting that despite good headline news in manufacturing, the share of manufacturing sub-sectors that is adding jobs seems to have peaked. (This is a diffusion index -- 50 means equal # of sectors adding and cutting jobs.)

@marthagimbel As always, lots of talk about how people out of the labor force, retirees, etc. affect all these numbers.
Here's one indicator: Adjusting for demographics (age & sex), the employment rate has now returned to prerecession level, but remains below 2000 peak.

@marthagimbel Similarly, *full-time* employment among prime-age (25-54) Americans is essentially back to prerecession level (lagging overall employment a bit).

@marthagimbel Speaking of full-time/part-time, haven't run these charts in a while: Essentially all the employment growth since the recession has been full-time (in part because there was a big shift toward part-time jobs in the recession).

@marthagimbel I'm a little surprised by this: The number of people entering or reentering the labor force is high, but trending down. Given strong hiring, low number of unemployed, I'd expect the opposite.

@marthagimbel To be clear, more people are entering the labor force as employed ("got a job" on the chart). But the number entering as unemployed ("started looking") is falling. So employers *are* pulling people off sidelines.

@marthagimbel Digging into today's manufacturing data a bit more deeply. Biggest gains in chemicals, transportation. Biggest losses in oil (no surprise), metals, apparel.