Employers added 252,000 jobs in December

The unemployment rate slipped from 5.8 to 5.6 percent in December. That’s the lowest since June 2008, but it’s not falling just because people are finding work. It has fallen in part becuase people are dropping out of the labor force — the big mass of Americans who are either working or looking for a job.

And because the headline unemployment rate only includes people in the labor force, lurking behind that much-recovered unemployment rate is a big group of people who want work but aren’t looking for it. As of December, there were 6.4 million of these people — roughly 2 million more than pre-recession.

The December jobs report is a mixed bag — a solid payrolls figure, but declining wages and labor force participation. But here’s one bit of encouraging news: 2014 was the best year for job creation since 1999.

In 2014, employers added nearly 3 million jobs, just shy of 1999’s 3.1 million. Of course, there’s a long way to go yet — more people working will mean a more sustained bump in paychecks than anything we’ve seen recently. But given the broader post-recession context, 2014 is a reason to cheer.

The jobs news in December’s jobs report was mostly good, but there was a disturbing fall in average hourly wages.

This is especially painful because wage growth had been holding steady at a too-low level throughout several years of recovery. We’d hoped to be asking ourselves when we would break out from this set point and see growth. Instead we saw the opposite.

US nonfarm employers added 252,000 jobs to their payrolls in December. That’s just over the 245,000 that economists expected, according to Bloomberg. The unemployment rate also slipped from 5.8 to 5.6 percent.

The headline payrolls figure helps finish out a strong year for job creation — the strongest of annual job growth since 1999, in fact, with nearly 3 million jobs added last year.

Last month’s jobs day was a stupendously positive surprise, showing that employers added 321,000 jobs in November. Friday, everyone will be watching to see if we repeated the magic in December.

Economists expect the report to show that the economy added 245,000 jobs last month, according to figures from Bloomberg — a strong figure, even if it’s nothing like November’s blowout. There were plenty of positive forces at work last month that could easily boost the payrolls figure — gas prices plummeted, for example, and consumer sentiment hit an eight-year high.