Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): JUDY WOODRUFF: The latest jobs report provides fresh evidence of improved hiring throughout 2014. But, even so, it’s a different kind of labor market, one that has not seen strong wage growth and has forced many into part-time work.
Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, has been looking into those trends. It’s part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): Pittsburgh’s Dan Stillwell, one of 147 million Americans counted as employed last month.
MAN: I work around 50 hours a week.
PAUL SOLMAN: Alex Stipula is another.
MAN: I work about 40 hours a week, just about.
PAUL SOLMAN: To economist Justin Wolfers, the employment picture for workers across the country was even brighter than reported in October, for at least two reasons.
JUSTIN WOLFERS, Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics: The labor market was pretty good. Now, the headlines don’t look quite so sunny. They say 214,000 jobs were created this month, which is less than has been created in the last few months.
PAUL SOLMAN: Right.
JUSTIN WOLFERS: But once you dig into the details, you start to see the good news.
PAUL SOLMAN: What details?
JUSTIN WOLFERS: The first is, the government actually runs two surveys. The employer survey gets all the attention. It probably should. It’s a better survey. But the household survey actually said it was a monstrously good month in October. It said 650,000 jobs were created. It surely wasn’t that good. So we should discount it, but we shouldn’t throw it away altogether.
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