Hiring Got Back To Normal in November After Hurricanes

It turns out that when there’s not a hurricane or strikes skewing the statistics, U.S. businesses are still in a hiring mood.

Employers added 227,000 jobs in November, bouncing back from 36,000 in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday. At the same time, the unemployment rate rose to 4.2% from 4.1%. Job creation beat the expectations of forecasters who had predicted jobs to increase by 214,000, according to a survey of economists by Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

Labor Market Bounced Back After Hurricanes, Strikes

The healthy number of jobs added showed the labor market recovering from disruptions from hurricanes Helene and Milton, not to mention a strike at Boeing in October, and staying resilient even as high interest rates from the Federal Reserve make borrowing costlier for businesses and individuals. By comparison, the U.S. has added an average of 175,000 jobs per month during the rest of 2024.

“The report showed job growth back to normal after October’s washout from the hurricanes and the Boeing strike,” Robert Frick, chief corporate economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a commentary.

Not only did the economy add more jobs than expected in November, the figures for September and October were revised upward by a total of 56,000, underscoring the health of the job market.

But What About Unemployment?

Although the unemployment rate ticked up, it has been hovering up and down between 4.1% and 4.3% for the last six months.

The fact that the unemployment rate and the hiring trends are headed in two different directions is not unusual: the two statistics are based on different surveys. The unemployment rate is based on a survey of households and is more prone to swings up and down than the jobs total, which is based on a larger survey of employers that economists consider more reliable.