U.S. Adds 200K Jobs As Unemployment Falls
The country's unemployment rate fell in December to 8.5 percent from a revised 8.7 percent in November as 371,000 part time workers found more work, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The country gained 200,000 jobs during the month, bringing 2011 total job creation to 1.6 million jobs. Seasonal hiring played a big part, with employment in transportation and warehousing adding 50,000 jobs during the holiday shopping season. Retail trade added 28,000 jobs.
Other sectors that added jobs included manufacturing, health care, leisure and hospitality and mining. Government and construction employment were flat.
Corey Adams, a Westborough-based metro market manager for Robert Half International, called the job figures "extremely positive and encouraging" and noted that Massachusetts has maintained a lower unemployment rate than the rest of the country throughout the recession.
"We saw a lot of our long-term temporary employees start to go from a temporary employee to a permanent employee in the month of December," Adams said. "Clearly companies are feeling better about their prospects for the year."
Adams said hot hiring sectors locally have been health care, manufacturing, high tech, biotech, and public accounting and tax preparation.
The national unemployment rate is the lowest it's been since March 2009, shortly before the rate began to climb, eventually reaching above 10 percent later that year. The rate has fallen more than half a percentage point since August.
There are still 13.1 million unemployed workers in the country, the government said. Not included in that figure are the 2.5 million who are "marginally attached" to the workforce, meaning they had looked for jobs over the past year, but not in the past month.
When counting those people, plus the 8.1 million still employed part time for economic reasons (because they can't find more hours), the "alternative measure" unemployment rate is actually 15.2 percent, down from 16.6 percent one year ago, according to BLS figures.
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