South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research analyzes the national employment report for January 2013.

The unemployment rate edged up slightly to 7.9 percent in January as the economy added 157,000 jobs in the month. The unemployment rate has essentially been unchanged the last five months. The January job growth was pretty much in line with expectations, but growth for the prior two months was revised up by 127,000. This brings the average rate of job growth over the last three months to 200,000, considerably better than the average of 168,000 over the last year.
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There were few noteworthy changes in the household data. There was a 0.4 percentage point rise in the unemployment rate for white men to 6.6 percent due to an influx of people looking for work. This could be a sign of the unemployed being more optimistic about their job prospects, but it may also just be an erratic fluctuation in the data. The participation rate for white men had fallen by 0.2 percentage points from October to December. The employment-population ratio for workers with just a high school degree fell by 0.3 percentage points to 54.0 percent, a new low for the downturn.