Trump inherits healthy job market with solid hiring

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

President Donald Trump has inherited a healthy-looking job market from his predecessor, with the U.S. economy registering a burst of hiring in January and an influx of Americans looking for work.

U.S. employers added 227,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday. That’s the biggest gain since September, and it exceeded last year’s monthly average of 187,000.

Unemployment ticked up to a still-low 4.8 percent from 4.7 percent in December. But it rose for an encouraging reason: More Americans started looking for work last month.

The unemployment rate counts only those people who are actually trying to find a job.

All told, more than a half-million Americans began looking in January, and the vast majority landed a job.

That suggests the job market could grow more quickly than expected in the coming months.

“You could have a faster pace of job growth, because you have more people out there looking for work,” said Michelle Meyer, chief U.S. economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Investors appeared upbeat about the jobs report. The Dow Jones industrial average rose 187 points to lift the index back above 20,000.

Yet some of the economy’s softness remains: Average hourly wages barely rose last month. And the number of people working part time who would prefer full-time work climbed.

The January figures reflect hiring that occurred mostly before Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20. Still, it was the first employment report to be released with Trump in the White House.

The president expressed satisfaction with the jobs report

Some of January’s hiring probably reflects weather and other seasonal quirks. Construction companies, for example, added 36,000 jobs, the most since March.

That figure might have been boosted by unseasonably warm weather in the Northeast.