WASHINGTON — U.S. employers added 145,000 jobs in December and the unemployment rate held steady at 3.5 percent, signaling that the job market remains strong at the start of 2020 even if hiring and wage gains have slowed somewhat more than a decade into an economic expansion.
Friday’s snapshot from the Labor Department showed hiring slipped from robust gains of 256,000 in November, which were given a boost by the end of a strike at General Motors. For the year, employers added an average of roughly 175,000 jobs per month; in 2018, it was about 223,250 per month.
Annual wage growth fell in December to 2.9 percent, down from an annualized average of 3.3 percent a year earlier, a possible sign that some slack remains in the labor market and that unemployment could fall even further from its current half-century low.
