Hiring around the U.S. slowed last sharply month as the coronavirus battered the economy, the Labor Department said Friday. Employers added 245,000 jobs in November, the slowest pace of monthly job growth since April, and about half what economists had expected.
The unemployment rate ticked down to 6.7%. But it fell for a bad reason — 400,000 people stopped looking for work, meaning they were no longer counted as unemployed.
Normally, adding nearly a quarter million jobs in a single month would signify healthy growth, but the economy faces a massive jobs deficit, with about 10 million fewer jobs since April. Nearly 4 million people have dropped out of the workforce altogether, meaning they are not working or looking for work.
This is a developing story.
