U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Marty Walsh on Friday reacted to the December jobs report showing that the U.S. economy added just 199,000 jobs in December, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.9%.
Fox Business Network’s Stuart Varney, host of “Varney & Company,” asked Walsh about the “big miss” after economists predicted 422,000 jobs were going to be added and the unemployment rate would end up at 4.1%.
Walsh called the report “solid” but acknowledged there was “work to do still.”
“Every month I’m on the TV, and, you know, the pundits or the experts always have a bigger number. And when I look at the report, it is a solid report. If you look at 2021 as a whole, President Biden, 6.4 million jobs have been added. That’s the single largest one-year gain in the history of our country. Unemployment rate is down 3.9%. It’s the lowest since the beginning of the pandemic. The American Rescue Plan clearly is working on getting sectors back to work. We do have work to do still, though. We all know that. We acknowledge that as we stand here today and talk.”
Walsh predicted the Omicron variant of the coronavirus and the uptick in cases “could have some impacts on next month’s report.”
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