Final jobs report under Obama underscores complicated legacy

When President Obama turns over the keys to the White House to President-elect Trump later this month, he will also hand over a complicated economic legacy.

There were 156,000 jobs added to the economy in December, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department — the 75th consecutive month of job gains, the longest streak since the US started tracking such things in 1939.

The number was lower than the 185,000 Wall Street had expected.

Plus, the 2.2 million jobs created in 2016 was the smallest number since 2012. There were 2.7 million jobs created in 2015.

At the same time, Labor reported that wages last month grew a strong 0.4 percent, the biggest monthly gain since June 2009. For the full year, average wages grew 2.9 percent, clearly outpacing the 2.5 percent increase in 2015 and the 1.7 percent in 2014.

A separate survey revealed that the unemployment rate — adults looking for work who didn’t have a job — ticked up 0.1 percent, to 4.7 percent.

When Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate was 7.3 percent.

“With wages on the rise and payrolls solid, the Fed is no doubt taking a healthy celebratory lap, feeling confident after this morning’s report in their decision to hike in December, and cautiously optimistic as they look out to the new year,” Lindsey Piegza, chief economist at Stifel Fixed Income in Chicago told Reuters.

Despite the drop in the unemployment rate and the steady — if not spectacular — job increases, many in the US have not felt as though they have benefited from the recovery after the 2008 economic crisis.

It was a feeling Trump successfully tapped into during his presidential campaign. He has said that the US has faced the “weakest so-called recovery since the Great Depression,” often citing that wages have been flat on a real-dollar basis since the 1970s.

In fact, in the years since the recession, wages struggled to consistently grow more than 2 percent annually.

The information services sector, which includes publishing and telecommunications, saw the greatest increase in wages in December, rising 4.3 percent from a year earlier, or roughly $57 a week.

Of the 156,000 jobs added to the economy last month, 63,000 were health-care and social assistance workers. Growth in health-care jobs this year was in line with last year’s performance, the BLS said.

But there were 70,000 fewer social assistance jobs added this year compared with last year.

And although food-service jobs were listed as a big winner in December, with 30,000 jobs were added, there were only 247,000 restaurant jobs added in 2016, down from 359,000 a year ago.

A loss of restaurant sector jobs is likely to be a continuing trend due to minimum-wage pressures.