MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The U.S. job market is downshifting. Employers are adding fewer jobs now than they were at the beginning of the year, and the jobless rate is inching up. So can people still pay their bills? We'll get an update tomorrow on the cost of living for November. In the meantime, NPR's Scott Horsley has been sifting through all the numbers, and he's with us now. Good morning, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning, Michel.
MARTIN: So the Federal Reserve decided to cut interest rates last week because officials were concerned about a softening job market. Were they right to be nervous?
HORSLEY: This latest report suggests they were. It shows that employers added only 64,000 jobs in November. And a lot of those jobs were in health care, which tends to be pretty recession-proof, while more sensitive industries like manufacturing and transportation lost jobs during the month. Overall, it seems clear the pace of hiring has slowed pretty sharply since the beginning of the year. Economist Laura Ullrich, who's with the Indeed Hiring Lab, calls this a sobering jobs report.
LAURA ULLRICH: It just really feels very stagnant, sluggish, still this kind of low-hire, low-fire environment.
HORSLEY: Low-hire, low-fire means a lot of people just feel stuck. Because of the government shutdown, we also got the October jobs numbers yesterday, more than a month behind schedule. And that report showed a net loss of jobs in October, although that was primarily because that's when a lot of federal workers who took buyouts earlier in the year formally dropped off the government's payroll.
MARTIN: And the unemployment rate is creeping higher. How worrying is that?
HORSLEY: Yeah. The unemployment rate was 4.6% in November, which is the highest in more than four years. Now, we should take that with a grain of salt. The government shutdown did affect the survey that's used to calculate the unemployment rate, so there's a little more uncertainty around that number than usual. But other measures are also pointing to a softening job market. For one thing, people who have jobs are much less likely to quit right now than they were a few years ago, and Ullrich says that suggests workers are just less confident that they could easily find a new job.
ULLRICH: People certainly are hugging on to their jobs, and it does remain true. I think that the probability of becoming unemployed is not all that high. There are not a ton of layoffs going on. However, if you become unemployed, it's difficult to find a job.
HORSLEY: And you can see that in some of these new numbers. About a quarter of the people who are unemployed right now have been out of work for more than six months.
MARTIN: Wow. That's a lot. So tomorrow, we'll get a report on what happened to prices in November. Are people's paychecks keeping pace with the cost of living?
HORSLEY: On average, they are. But, you know, a lot of workers may feel like they're having to work really hard just to stay afloat. Average wages in November were up 3.5% from a year ago. Inflation, meanwhile, has been running around 3%. But wages are certainly not going up as fast as they were a year ago, which is another sign of the softening job market. Employers just don't have to offer much higher wages now in order to recruit and retain workers the way they did when the job market was really humming. Laura Ullrich notes that millions of people are now working more than one job, and not necessarily by choice.
ULLRICH: I think you can attribute that to the affordability crisis that's in the news everywhere, right? Even people that have employment maybe feel like they need more than one job.
HORSLEY: In fact, the share of workers who are moonlighting at a second or even third job is now the highest it's been in 25 years.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Scott Horsley. Scott, thank you.
HORSLEY: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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