The nation’s employers kept hiring briskly in November despite high inflation and a slow-growing economy — a sign of resilience in the face of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes.
The economy added 263,000 jobs, while the unemployment rate stayed 3.7%, still near a 53-year low, the Labor Department said Friday. November’s job growth dipped only slightly from October’s 284,000 gain.
Last month’s hiring amounted to a substantial increase. All year, as inflation has surged and the Fed has imposed ever-higher ...
...borrowing rates, America’s labor market has defied skeptics, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs, month after month.
Though steady hiring and rising wages have fueled their spending, Americans are also turning increasingly to credit ...
...cards to keep up with higher prices. Many are also digging into savings, a trend that cannot continue indefinitely.
Some signs of weakness have sparked concerns about a likely recession next year, in part because many fear that the Fed’s surging rate hikes will end up derailing the economy.
Particularly in the technology, media and retail industries, a rising number of companies have made high-profile layoff announcements.
In addition to job cuts from tech behemoths like Amazon, Meta and Twitter, smaller companies — including DoorDash, the real estate firm Redfin and the retailers Best Buy and the Gap — have said they will lay off workers.
And in November, a measure of factory activity dropped to a level that suggested that the manufacturing sector is contracting for the first time since May 2020.