An Uptick in Nonfarm Payroll Jobs

While little encouragement could be found in the December jobs report released last week, there was this ray of light: 14 metro areas saw an increase in nonfarm payroll jobs from November 2008 to November 2009. The uptick was led by the Tri-Cities (Kennewick-Richland-Pasco) in Washington state, which increased by 3.8%.

Here’s a chart included by the New York Times’ Economix blog:

Brian Kelsey at the Civic Analytics blog focuses on the “lost decade” for employment after looking at the jobs report. As he points out, US manufacturing lost a hard-to-fathom 1,547 jobs per day from 1999-2009.