US gained 64,000 jobs in November but lost 105,000 in October; unemployment rate at 4.6%

The United States gained a decent 64,000 jobs in November but lost 105,000 in October as federal workers departed after cutbacks by the Trump administration, the government said in delayed reports. The unemployment rate rose to 4.6%, the highest since 2021.

Both the October and November job creation numbers, released Tuesday (December 16) by the Labour Department, came in late because of the 43-day federal government shutdown.

The November job gains came in higher than the 40,000 economists had forecast. The October job losses were caused by a 162,000 drop in federal workers, many of whom resigned at the end of fiscal year 2025 on September 30 under pressure from billionaire Elon Musk’s purge of US government payrolls. Labour Department revisions also knocked 33,000 jobs off August and September payrolls.

Hiring has clearly lost momentum, hobbled by uncertainty over President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Federal Reserve engineered in 2022 and 2023 to rein in an outburst of inflation.

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American companies are mostly holding onto the employees they have. But they’re reluctant to hire new ones as they struggle to assess how to use artificial intelligence and how to adjust to President Donald Trump’s unpredictable policies, especially his double-digit taxes on imports from around the world.

The uncertainty leaves jobseekers struggling to find work or even land interviews. Federal Reserve policymakers are divided over whether the labour market needs more help from lower interest rates. Their deliberations are rendered more difficult because official reports on the economy’s health are coming in late and incomplete after a 43-day government shutdown.

The unemployment rate, though still modest by historical standards, has risen since bottoming out at a 54-year low of 3.4% in April 2023. Adding to the uncertainty is the growing use of artificial intelligence and other technologies that can reduce demand for workers.

“We have seen a lot of the businesses that we support are stuck in that stagnant mode: ‘Are we going to hire or are we not? What can we automate? What do we need the human touch with?’’’ said Matt Hobbie, vice president of the staffing firm HealthSkil in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

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“We’re in Lehigh Valley, which is a big transportation hub in eastern Pennsylvania. We’ve seen some cooling in the logistics and transportation markets, specifically because we’ve seen automation in those sectors, robotics.’’

Worries about the job market were enough to nudge the Fed into cutting its benchmark interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point last week for the third time this year.

But three Fed officials refused to go along with the move, the most dissents in six years. Some Fed officials are balking at further cuts while inflation remains above the central bank’s 2% target. Two voted to keep the rate unchanged. Stephen Miran, appointed by Trump to the Fed’s governing board in September, voted for a bigger cut – in line with what the president demands.

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Because of the government shutdown, the Labour Department did not release its jobs reports for September, October and November on time. It finally put out the September jobs report on November 20, seven weeks late.

It published some of the October data – including a count of the jobs created that month by businesses, nonprofits and government agencies – along with the November report on Tuesday. But it did not release an unemployment rate for October because it could not calculate the number during the shutdown.