Employers created 227,000 jobs in November, an improvement from a weaker report in October, a month marked by hurricanes and strikes, reported The Washington Post.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%, from 4.1% in October. The share of people age 25 to 54 who were working or looking for work in November remained at 83.5%, which is down from a cycle high of 84% over the summer, according to The New York Times.

The November employment report signals that the U.S. job market remains durable even though it has lost significant momentum from the 2021-2023 hiring boom, when the economy was rebounding from the pandemic recession, wrote the Associated Press. The job market’s “gradual slowdown is, in part, a result of the high interest rates the Federal Reserve engineered in its drive to tame inflation.”

“This was a recovery month,” Robert Frick, an economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, told AP. “When you mix everything together, you have still have a moderately expanding jobs market. … The labor market is stable.”

“Economists also noted that the November job gains were narrow: Just three categories of employers—healthcare and social assistance; leisure and hospitality; and government—accounted for 70% of the added jobs. And the 22,000 jobs that factories gained in November were boosted by the end of strikes at Boeing and elsewhere that restored many workers to their employers’ payrolls. Retailers, by contrast, shed 28,000 jobs,” according to the AP.

Wage growth in November “grew by 0.4% compared with the previous month. Average hourly earnings have risen by 4% this year, to $35.61 an hour, outpacing the rate of inflation and boosting workers’ pocketbooks,” reported the NYT. “While Americans with jobs are prospering, those who are unemployed increasingly struggle to find opportunities. People are staying unemployed for longer.” The number of Americans on unemployment for 27 weeks or longer has grown by 1.2 million over the past year.

Last week, NACS Daily reported that 3.4 million Americans quit their jobs in October.

This figure means “there are now 1.1 available jobs for each unemployed worker, a healthy figure. Before the pandemic there were usually more unemployed people than openings.”