US employers closed out the year much the way they started, notching another month of slow job growth that did little to alter the hiring picture.
The Labor Department said yesterday that the economy added 155,000 jobs in December, while the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 7.8 percent after it was revised up slightly for November.
It marked the second straight year of expanding payrolls — but at rates too weak to goose the recovery or make much of a difference to the 12.2 million workers still without jobs.
While payrolls grew in all but two of the 13 sectors measured by the government, some economists remained unimpressed.
“The US economy is just muddling through,” said Tom di Galoma, managing director at Navigate Advisors.
Most economists forecast that the economy will continue to grow at a tepid annual rate of about 2 percent this year.
On the plus side, December’s hiring rise showed that employers were able to brush off concerns about Washington’s budget impasse and the fiscal cliff crisis, analysts said.
In addition, the anemic job creation might be enough to persuade the Federal Reserve to maintain its policy of applying steady doses of stimulus, known as quantitative easing, until hiring picks up steam.
Indeed, the prospect of continued stimulus cheered Wall Street and sent stocks higher for a second day.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index closed at its highest level since December 2007, rising 7.10 to 1,466.47. The Dow Jones industrial average added 43.85 to 13,435.21, while the Nasdaq edged up 1.09 to 3,101.66.
The biggest December hiring growth came in the higher paying jobs of professional and business services, with a jump of 2.7 percent from a year earlier, or 18,065 jobs.
The biggest single employer — government — suffered shrinking payrolls for a third straight year, mostly among teachers, with 21,925 people hired last month, the Labor Department said.
The publishing and telecom sector rounded out the bottom with the hiring of 2,625 in December, off 0.8 percent from a year ago.