US unemployment falls to lowest level since 1969

By data US Federal Bureau of Statistics of the Department of Labor, in January, unemployment in the US was 3.4%, and this is the lowest level since 1969. The number of unemployed in the United States in January slightly increased compared to December, when they were 5.35 million, and reached 5.7 million. Of these, the number of long-term, that is, more than 27 weeks of unemployed remained the same – 1.1 million.

Unexpectedly, the results in terms of the number of new jobs turned out to be very strong – in January they were added 517 thousand, which is 2.5 times more than expected economists, and almost twice as many as in December 2022. This is higher than the monthly average for the number of new places in 2022, which amounted to 401,000.

The leaders in the number of new jobs have traditionally been the hotel and leisure sector, the sector of professional and business services, as well as healthcare. In the hotel and leisure sector, 128 thousand new jobs were added (against 89 thousand on average per month in 2022). At the same time, the number of jobs in this sector still does not reach the level of February 2020, that is, before the start of the pandemic: then there were 2.9% more of them. In the professional and business services sector, 82 thousand jobs were added, in healthcare – 79 thousand. In the information technology sector, jobs, by contrast, fell by 5 thousand, which is not surprising, given the large-scale reductions in recent weeks in large technology companies in the United States, including AlphabetAmazon, Meta and Microsoft.

Alena Miklashevskaya