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Millions remain long-term unemployed despite big decline in November US jobless rate

04 December 2021 11:30 (UTC +04:00)

New data for November released Friday by the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed that just 210,000 jobs were added to the US economy last month, which was the smallest gain since last December, when the United States entered the worst phase of the pandemic thus far, APA reports citing Sputnik.

However, at the same time, some 546,000 people entered the workforce, sending the unemployment rate down from 4.6% to 4.2% - its lowest point since February 2020, the last month before the COVID-19 pandemic began, although still 3.9 million fewer than that time.

Of course, there are also 783,000 fewer people missing from the economy, too, 184,000 of whom were of working age.

Those numbers came as a bit of a shock, since many economists had predicted a much stronger job growth going into the end-of-year holiday season. Dow Jones, for example, estimated that 573,000 jobs would be created and unemployment would only decline by one tenth of a percent, to 4.5%.

However, performance was still better than in October and September, during which the peak of the delta outbreak occurred.