The big news in the Jan jobs report was what it told us about 2023 and 2024

After a busy weekend out of town, I wanted to catch up on what was a solid jobs report to start 2025.

The U.S. added 143,000 jobs in January, fewer than economists expected, but the unemployment rate inched down to 4% from 4.1%, beating forecasts and still near historic lows.

Forecasters surveyed by Dow Jones had anticipated 169,000 payroll gains in January, after a blowout 307,000 jump in December, according to revised tallies. The numbers released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics include routine annual data adjustments, in which November and December payroll levels were revised up by a combined 100,000.

But to me, the big story with this jobs release was less about what happened in January 2025, but what was changed about what we knew about jobs numbers in 2024 and 2023.

The BLS revised down the monthly pace of job gains for 2024, to an average of 166,000 from a previous estimate of 186,000, reinforcing widespread expectations that hiring last year wasn't quite as robust as earlier data had suggested. For the period covering 2023 and early 2024, the U.S. added 589,000 fewer payrolls.

At the same time, millions of people's paychecks continue to swell. Average hourly earnings rose 4.1% over the past year, partly thanks to minimum wage hikes that took effect last month in 21 states and dozens of municipalities, noted Mark Hamrick, senior economist at Bankrate. The Economic Policy Institute estimated in December that more than 9.2 million workers would see increases in January totaling $5.7 billion.

Interestingly, the downward revision of 589,000 through March 2024 is quite a bit less than the 818,000 that was the preliminary downward revision from August.

Move forward to December, and the total amount of jobs was revised down by 610,000. There was a notable slowdown in job growth in mid-2024 with 3 straight months of (seasonally adjusted) job growth below 100,000, and private sector job growth of 66,000, 40,000 and 33,000 for June, July and August. But as 2024 has ended and 2025 began, job growth has picked up, with 3 of the last 4 months seeing job growth of 240,000 or more. So any thought of things tipping over into net job losses has been set aside for now.

It's still an overall good picture, as jobs continued to grow at a 12-month rate near or above 2 million throughout 2024. But the revisions show a consistent slowdown from the boom we saw as COVID vaccinations became widespread, and the growth slowed earlier and more signficantly than we knew.

In addition, the revisions confirm that there was a drop in manufacturing jobs as interest rates rose and stayed high over the last 2 years, including a loss of 107,000 manufacturing jobs in 2024. That’s in notable contrast to the consistent increases in construction that have continued, including another 23,000 in that sector for January.

There also were revisions to the household survey, which had changes in the other direction when it came to the number of Americans working. It was revised up by 2 million compared to previous numbers, and it goes along with December’s updated Census numbers which showed the US population grew by its fastest rate in more than 20 years. This chart from UW-Madison economist Menzie Chinn illustrates the closing of the gap we had previously seen.

This revision also puts down a talking point that Trump/GOP frequently used, which used the household survey to make a questionable claim that there was a decline in Americans working over the last year, and or that any new jobs were going to immigrants. The new numbers say that the number of native-born Americans working went up by 766,000 between January 2024 and January 2025. That’s not a huge jump, and unemployment among native-born Americans did go up slightly in that time, but certainly not a loss.

These revisions to the household and payrolls surveys are yet another bit of data that makes me say "It would have been nice for voters to have this information BEFORE the election." And for policymakers, because if the Fed had seen job growth slowing down as much as it was in 2023, maybe they wouldn't have waited until September 2024 to start cutting rates from their 23-year highs, and we would have recognized that the US labor force was growing by a sizable amount, showing that there was more slack in the labor market, leading the less inflationary pressure.

Lastly, I can trust these numbers for January because the survey data happened before the Trump Administration took office, and before Elon Musk and his pack of dweebs started trying to wreck the work and information gathered by the federal government. Given the way these guys roll, am I going to be able to trust the numbers that Trump's DC folks produce, especially as inflation and austerity seem likely to slow our job and economic growth further in 2025?