RALEIGH – Nationwide, the economy added 467,000 jobs in January 2022 and the unemployment rate is now 4%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning.
That’s stronger than previously expected.
A monthly report from ADP released earlier this week tracked the loss of 301,000 jobs, and economists had predicted a wide range of jobs numbers, from a loss of 270,000 jobs to a gain of about 150,000 jobs.
The BLS report found that growth in the leisure and hospitality sector, as well as in professional and business services, retail trade, and transportation and warehousing continued.
Little change to unemployment rate
“Both the unemployment rate, at 4.0 percent, and the number of unemployed persons, at 6.5 million, changed little in January,” the BLS report reads. Year-over-year, the nationwide unemployment rate has fallen by 2.4% with the total number of unemployed persons declining by 3.7 million.
Prior to the onset of the global coronavirus pandemic, in February 2020, the unemployment rate nationally was 3.5% with 5.7 million unemployed persons, the report noted.
“We did learn a lot from this release about the strength of the US economy, the large revisions to previous months, and acceleration of wages,” Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University, wrote on Twitter just 25 minutes after predicting there wouldn’t be many takeaways from this morning’s report.
This take aged badly–and it was only 25 minutes ago. I think we did learn a lot from this release about the strength of the US economy, the large revisions to previous months, and acceleration of wages. https://t.co/GEwCmZMr05
— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) February 4, 2022
The latest numbers from North Carolina’s Department of Commerce show that the unemployment rate in the state was 3.7% in December 2021. Triangle area counties saw some of the lowest unemployment rates in the state, the Commerce Department found in analyzing the data.
Firms across the Triangle have picked up hiring, with an increase in job postings in recent weeks. And a recent report from Indeed found that two metropolitan areas in North Carolina ranked in the top 10 metro regions in the country when it came to the percentage growth of job postings compared to February 2020. In that report, the Durham-Chapel Hill area ranked third, and Greensboro-High Point ranked eighth.
Triangle counties have some of lowest unemployment rates in NC
National trends in worker groups
The BLS jobs report noted that the unemployment rate for adult men is 3.8% and is 3.6% for adult women.
For those who identify as Black, the unemployment rate is 6.9%.
“Among the unemployed, the number of job leavers increased to 952,000 in January, following a decrease in the prior month. The number of persons on temporary layoff, at 959,000 in January, also increased over the month but is down by 1.8 million over the year,” the report noted. “The number of permanent job losers, at 1.6 million, changed little in January but is down by 1.9 million from a year earlier.”
More people quit in 2021 than any prior year, WRAL TechWire reported, even though the total number of people who left their jobs in December 2021 was lower than the all-time high set in November 2021.
Even with the changes in the labor market, the labor force participation rate changed very little. The BLS report notes that the labor force participation rate “held at 62.2% in January.”
Part-time employment, due to economic reasons, declined in January 2022, as well. Currently, the report tracked 3.7 million part-time employees who are working those roles for economic reasons, a year-over-year decline of 2.2 million jobs.
The result is that this segment of the labor market is now 673,000 below the February 2020 level, the report noted.
“These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs,” the report reads.
Raleigh, Durham, among top 15 cities to move to for remote work roles
Remote work increased
As companies responded to the emergence of a new variant, Omicron, the share of employees who worked remotely increased to 15.4%, the report found.
“These data refer to employed persons who teleworked or worked at home for pay at some point in the 4 weeks preceding the survey specifically because of the pandemic,” the report reads.
And of those not in the labor force in January, 1.8 million people cited they were prevented from looking for work due to the pandemic, an increase of 700,000 people from the prior month, the report’s data tables show.
