The economy added fewer jobs than expected in December, but wages rose


U.S. non-farm employers added 156,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department said Friday in the last monthly employment report of the Obama administration. That number fell below expectations — economists polled by MarketWatch had forecast 180,000 new jobs — and the average growth for the previous 11 months, but rounded out the sixth straight year of employment gains of more than 2 million jobs. The unemployment rate edged up to 4.7 percent from 4.6 percent. Average hourly wages rose by 0.4 percent, slightly more than expected. That pushed year-to-year wage gains to 2.9 percent, the biggest jump since the end of the recession in 2009.
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
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