US hiring likely rebounded last month after storms and strikes curtailed October job growth

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Hiring in the United States likely rebounded last month from a dismal October, when hurricanes and strikes reduced job growth to its lowest level in nearly four years

WASHINGTON — Hiring in the United States likely rebounded last month from a dismal October, when hurricanes and strikes reduced job growth to its lowest level in nearly four years.

Friday's jobs report from the Labor Department is expected to show that employers added roughly 208,000 jobs in November, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet. That would mark a sharp bounce-back from October’s gain of just 12,000 jobs, the fewest in any month since December 2020.

The job market has cooled from the dizzying heights of 2021-2023, when the economy was delivering a robust recovery from the pandemic recession of 2020 and many employers were hiring aggressively. Still, October’s slump was exaggerated by the temporary effects of Hurricanes Helene and Milton and by strikes at Boeing and elsewhere.

Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, has estimated that the hurricanes reduced hiring in October by 75,000 but that by November, 60,000 of those workers were back on payrolls. Likewise, the end of strikes at Boeing and Textron Aviation is thought to have increased payrolls last month by up to 38,000 jobs.

Overall, Vanden Houten wrote in a commentary, the November jobs report will probably show that hiring remains “relatively strong.’’

The unemployment rate is thought to have remained at a low 4.1% in November, a sign that Americans as a whole are enjoying unusual job security. This week, the government reported that layoffs fell to just 1.6 million in October, below the lowest levels in the two decades that preceded the