What to expect on February jobs day

Economists are guessing that the unemployment rate held steady at 5.6 percent in January, with nonfarm employers adding 230,000 jobs. That would be a slowdown in job creation from December, when workplaces added 252,000 jobs, and it’s also a big deceleration from November’s blazing pace of 353,000 new jobs.

It’s a deceleration, but it’s no reason to worry, according to Guy LeBas, chief fixed income strategist at financial services firm Janney Montgomery Scott, who called the underlying trend job growth “one of the brightest points for the domestic economy” in a Thursday note.

As has been the trend lately, the interesting news out of the jobs report may be from non-headline numbers. Wages are currently one of the closest-watched barometers of whether the labor market is truly tightening, and in December, they slipped by 5 cents per hour, almost entirely obliterating November’s gain of 6 cents. That was hopefully just a blip. If it continues, that’s a sign that something truly is wrong in our job market.

Even if job growth once again comes in as solid-but-unremarkable, there will still be other room for big excitement in tomorrow’s jobs report, in the form of benchmark revisions. These are revisions of how many jobs the economy added last year, so we could find out that really things were a fair sight better (or worse) than we previously thought in 2014. In 2013, the revisions subtracted 119,000 jobs from the Labor Department’s count. But in 2012, they added more than 400,000.

All of which is just another reminder that no matter how excited (or upset) we get over the jobs day figures in any given month, those figures are revised ...and then again...and then yet again.