WASHINGTON – Look past the booming November job gain of 321,000 reported Friday, which is the best figure in three years in the strongest year for U.S. hiring since 1999.
The job market reached a new milestone on its road to full health: For the first time since the Great Recession ended 5½ years ago, America’s unemployed now are as likely to be hired as to stop looking for a job.
It means that employers have grown confident enough to fill more job vacancies. And it means the unemployed now are less likely to succumb to frustration.
The hiring surge owes much to solid consumer spending – on items such as cars, electronics and restaurant meals. That, in turn, has given businesses the means to step up investment in computers, facilities and machinery. Thanks to such spending, the economy grew at a 4.3 percent annual pace from April through September – the healthiest six-month spurt since 2003. Employers have responded by adding a robust average of 241,000 jobs a month this year.
For each month, the government estimates the proportion of the unemployed who found work and the proportion who stopped looking. In November, 23 percent of people who were out of work the previous month found jobs, and the same percentage gave up looking. (The figures are three-month averages, intended to smooth out volatility.)
That was the highest percentage of the unemployed to find work in any month since the recession officially ended in June 2009. A year ago, fewer than 19 percent of the unemployed were finding jobs.
The increase marks the first such sustained improvement since the recession ended. This year’s acceleration in hiring has been potent enough to finally soak up a significant proportion of the jobless. During the first four years of the recovery, businesses hired at a rate that merely was enough to keep up with population growth.
One sour note amid the improving outlook for the unemployed: The jobless are likelier now than before the recession to land only part-time work. Though the economy has regained all the jobs lost to the recession, there still are nearly 2 million fewer people with full-time work.
In other cases, the jobs the formerly unemployed have now pay less than those they had before.
