American employment surged in November

Economist Justin Wolfers this morning highlighted one more astounding fact about this morning’s surprisingly strong jobs report:

If you watch the job market closely, over the last year, you’ve heard journalists (this one included) and economists and pundits bemoan the constant ok-but-not-great monthly job growth. And while job reports as upbeat as this latest one are rare, job growth has, at the very least, been consistently positive for more than four years now.

Here’s one type of work we want to see less of: involuntary part-time work. And the November jobs report showed the number of people working part-time for economic reasons continued to fall. This time, it declined by 177,000 from October to November.

This group includes people who are working part-time and want to work full-time, but can’t find a full-time job or get the hours. It has been on a long-term decline since 2009, with an encouraging steady decline in the last few months.

On the surface, today’s jobs report was great news — employers added 321,000 jobs in November.

Dig a little bit deeper, though, and you see even more good news.

Non-farm employers added 321,000 jobs in November, according to data released Friday from the Labor Department, and the unemployment rate remained at 5.8 percent. This is a big positive surprise — economists had expected the report to say firms added only 230,000 jobs last month. It’s also the biggest single month of payroll growth since January 2012.

Wages inched upward but didn’t break free of their recent flat growth. Average hourly earnings were up 2.1 percent year over year, to $24.66, and up 9 cents from the prior month. That’s a good sign, but more wage growth would be a sign that slack in the labor market has finally lessened. Wage growth has been stuck at around 2 percent for a few years now, only slightly higher than the rate of inflation.

Friday, is Jobs Day, and if the last few months are any guide, the Labor Department will report a new, pretty unremarkable estimate for November job growth. Economists expect the figure to be around 230,000, which would be squarely in line with most of 2014 thus far, with an unemployment rate unchanged at 5.8 percent, according to Bloomberg estimates.

In that sense, jobs day has grown sort of monotonous lately. But there’s still a lot behind the headline numbers. The real story these days isn’t the payrolls figure; it’s other numbers buried in the report. One big one is wages. Hourly wage growth has been bumping along at around 2 percent for a while. When it finally starts to grow, that will be a sign that some of the slack has exited the labor market.