LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - According to recently released data from BLS, the total number of people employed had climbed to 143,262,000 last month, an overall increase of 847,000 in the six months since June.

The number of people with government jobs increased by 621,000 to 20,559,000, the same five-month period since June. These 621,000 new government jobs created in the last five months equal 73.3 percent of the 847,000 new jobs created overall.

Surprisingly, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy did not make a dent in employment as was feared. Overall, U.S. employment grew faster than expected in November as the hit from storm Sandy on payrolls was less forceful than many feared.
The jobless rate fell to a near four-year low, regrettably because so many Americans had abandoned their job search.

Nonfarm employment increased by 146,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, defying expectations of a sharp pull back related to storm Sandy.

U.S. financial markets appeared to put more faith in the payroll growth figures, with stock index futures turning positive and prices for U.S. government debt falling.

"The labor market is not getting worse, but is also not getting much better as it is unchanged relative to the recent trend," Jacob Oubina, a senior U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets in New York says.

The 0.2 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate to 7.7 percent -- the lowest since December 2008 -- represented a drop in both the labor force and employment as measured by a survey of households. Economists generally rely more heavily on the payrolls reading from the separate and much larger survey of employers.

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