Labor Department

The number of people filing for unemployment benefits has fallen to its lowest point since 1969, according to data released by the Labor Department Thursday. These numbers are another sign of a tight labor market. And they’ve got retailers thinking about the holiday season. Click the audio player above to hear the full story. 

The latest unemployment number for December comes out today (Friday, Jan. 5th). With the ranks of the unemployed declining in 2017, it’s getting harder for employers to add jobs and find qualified candidates to fill them. So some employers are starting to settle for candidates they might have overlooked in the past. Maybe employers are […]

We haven’t seen much in wage gains out of recent jobs reports from the Labor Department. The most recent one, for June, showed average hourly wages, as reported by employers, up just 2.5 percent over the past year, not much better than inflation. But another measure of income from the Labor Department, based on a […]

We’ll get the Labor Department’s jobs report for April today. The report for March was dismal — just 98,000 jobs added — though economists think that was a winter-weather-induced aberration. But even if job creation rises this spring and summer, it’ll still be well short of what’s needed to create the kind of supercharged employment […]