by Lucia Mutikani
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (Reuters) – The US economy created significantly fewer jobs than expected in December amid a labor shortage, the Department of Labor’s monthly report shows Friday, and the labor market could be held back by business disruptions linked to the COVID-19 outbreak.
The total number of non-farm jobs rose by 199,000 last month as economists and analysts polled by Reuters on average forecast an increase of 400,000, with estimates ranging between 150,000 and 1.1 million.
The number of jobs created in November was revised upwards to 249,000 against 210,000 initially announced.
At the same time, the unemployment rate fell to 3.9% from 4.2% a month earlier, a drop that reflects persistent tensions in the labor market. The consensus gave it at 4.1%.
Average hourly wages rose 0.6% from November as the market forecast a 0.4% increase. Its growth over one year, however, came back to 4.7% after + 5.1% a month earlier, with certain increases at the end of 2020 no longer being taken into account.
Many observers expect jobs to be held back by the spread of the Omicron variant of the virus over the United States, where the daily number of new COVID-19 cases reached nearly one million on Monday, a unprecedented level globally.
This new wave of the epidemic has forced airlines to cancel thousands of flights and schools have had to close their doors to switch back to distance education, forcing parents to stop working.
People who are sick, in quarantine or whose salary is suspended are counted as unemployed even if they still have an employment contract.
The contrast between the figures for December and those for January could be all the more marked as those of last month are established on the basis of a survey carried out around mid-December, so at the very beginning of the Omicron wave in the country.
(Report Lucia Mutikani, French version Marc Angrand, edited by Blandine Hénault)