Americans celebrated on Friday the release of what was, by one key measure, the best monthly jobs report since the start of the Great Recession.
But one Congresswoman cautioned that the economic recovery that has taken place since the Wall Street collapse of 2008 hasn’t benefited all Americans equally.
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) hailed the relative state of the economy, but noted that “this recovery remains unequal and too many Americans are still struggling to find a job, especially in communities of color.”
“The unemployment rate for African Americans and Latinos continues to be higher than the national average at 10.7 percent and 6.7 percent, respectively,” she added. For the former, the rate of joblessness is almost twice as high as it is for all Americans.
Lee urged Congress to extend benefits to long-term unemployed Americans, raise the minimum wage and pass “provisions of the President’s Budget Proposal to rebuild our nation’s crippling infrastructure, invest in workforce training and create good-paying jobs for all.”
Preliminary data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the economy added a net of 257,000 jobs in January, with the private sector expanding payrolls by 267,000.
Unemployment was up slightly in January to 5.7 percent, but that was due to Americans joining the workforce. The labor force participation rate was up 0.2 percentage points to 62.9 percent, while the employment-population ratio was up 0.1 percentage point to 59.3 percent.
While the jobs gains in January could be revised downward, with economic data around the holiday season routinely unreliable, BLS did say that jobs gains in November and December were higher than previously estimated.
By one measure, workers haven’t had it so good for a long time. Average hourly earnings were up by 0.5 percent in January, the biggest month-over-month increase since late 2008, The New York Times noted.
Guy Berger, an RBS economist, told the Times that Friday’s release brought “the best employment report we’ve had in a long time,” while Ian Shepherdson, the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics said “employment growth is astonishingly strong,” according to the paper.
But there are other indications the fruits of last month’s good news are concentrated in the hands of a few. Average weekly earnings of non-supervisory workers were only up in January by $0.29 to $702.75–an increase of less than one half of one tenth of a percentage point.
