In November, just 245k jobs were added to the US labor force.

Meanwhile, 37% of jobless workers are now long-term unemployed (6+ months) and >7mil people who aren’t in the labor force report wanting a job but aren’t counted in the u-rate.

Now that the 2020 Census is over, there was a decrease in 100k government employees. 21k local education workers lost jobs last month.

15 million people are still reporting being unable to work at some point in the last month because of business closure/losses.

This is unchanged from October, and combined with a very small growth in jobs, shows that we’ve stalled progress in labor market recovery.

For context, adding 245k jobs last month is close to the 225k jobs added in Jan 2020. Except then we thought we were approaching full employment and labor markets were tight.

That kind of pace won’t get us back to a pre-COVID labor market any time soon.

Last November, we added 266k jobs. The unemployment rate was 3.5%.

This November, we added 245k jobs. The unemployment rate is 6.7%.

This is not what recovery looks like.