In a sign the economic momentum evident late last year has carried into 2015, the Labor Department said Friday that American employers added 257,000 jobs in January, as wage growth rebounded and more people joined the work force.
The Labor Department said on Friday that the unemployment rate ticked up to 5.7 percent, from 5.6 percent. But that was mostly because the portion of Americans in the work force rose slightly last month, a positive sign.
Over the course of 2014, the economy added about 250,000 jobs a month on average. But employers grew bolder in the final quarter of the year, creating an average of more than 290,000 jobs a month in October, November and December. Hiring in sectors like leisure and hospitality, retail, and professional and business services was especially robust.
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The Federal Reserve, in particular, has been trying to gauge whether workers’ paychecks are rising and whether the labor market slack built up since the recession is finally receding.
The central bank has indicated that it will begin the long-anticipated process of raising short-term interest rates from near zero later this year, but persistently low inflation and little evidence of building wage pressures could delay that.
Until recently, many economists had been expecting policy makers to lift rates at their June meeting, but several experts have recently pushed the target date to September.
