Unemployment Rate Edged Up in Nov.
With U.S. economic growth slowing, the nation's unemployment rate ticked up to 4 percent last month while employers' payrolls grew only modestly, the Labor Department reported yesterday.</br></br>Analysts said the report provided further confirmation that growth has slowed recently from the very rapid pace of the first half of this year, which many economists and policymakers regarded as unsustainable. However, the details showed little sign of excessive weakness that would point to a serious slump.</br></br>While employers added 94,000 workers to their payrolls, the total number of hours worked last month fell 0.2 percent as firms cut back slightly on the length of the average workweek. The reduction was sharpest in the manufacturing sector, where payrolls were virtually unchanged but hours worked dropped by 0.7 percent.</br></br>"It looks pretty favorable to me," said economist James Glassman of Chase Securities in New York. "You have more confirmation of the slowing in growth, but not so much that unemployment is rising sharply. If you could freeze everything where it is now, it would be just about perfect.</br></br>"Growth has slowed to a sustainable rate, workers' pay is going up and inflation fears are waning," Glassman said. "Everybody has gotten gloomy about the outlook because of companies warning about profits and the stock market is down. In financial markets, there is stress and worry about credit problems. But to me this is all part of the process of cooling off from a superheated growth rate."