Here’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner’s statement on the latest employment situation. In a nutshell, the commissioner reports:

Nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in November (+39,000), and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.8 percent.  The jobless rate had been 9.6 percent in each of the prior 3 months.  Payroll employment has increased by an average of 86,000 per month since its recent low point in December 2009. In November, temporary help services and health care added jobs, while employment fell in retail trade.

The excellent Calculated Risk blog has analysis and graphs, including the one below that we’ve cited before.

The weak job numbers were lower than economists had anticipated. The Associated Press reports,

Private companies – the backbone of the economy – created only 50,000 jobs. That was down significantly from the 160,000 private-sector jobs created in October and was the smallest gain since January.

With hiring so weak, the unemployment rate rose from 9.6 percent to 9.8 percent. The jobless rate has now topped 9 percent for 19 straight months, the longest stretch on record.

At Commentary, John Steele Gordon notes one aspect of the digital economy that has received little attention.

A particularly nasty surprise was the loss of 28,000 retail jobs, which most economists, responding to fairly good news about holiday sales, etc., expected to increase. But more and more of those sales are happening online, which is a much less labor-intensive means of selling goods. Online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving were up a whopping 20 percent from last year.

This, of course, is just more evidence that the on-rolling digital revolution is causing unemployment to recover from recession much more slowly than the economy as a whole.

The long slog continues.