Downbeat jobs

Darker and more depressing than the Cure's Disintegration album, the U.S. jobs report for November:

A surprisingly soft 112,000 new U.S. jobs were created in November, the Labor Department said on Friday, casting a shadow across an already downbeat holiday sales season with consumers apparently worried by scarce work and high oil prices.

The November figure -- the weakest since July -- came in well below Wall Street economists' forecasts for 180,000 new jobs, though the unemployment rate eased to 5.4 percent from 5.5 percent in October.

In a further sign the labor market is improving only slowly, the Labor Department lowered its estimates for job growth in both September and October.

October's gain was marked down to 303,000 from an originally reported 337,000-job increase. The department cut September's total to 119,000 from 139,000.

The battered U.S. dollar came under renewed pressure immediately after the jobs data, losing more ground against the euro. Bond prices rallied on hopes the number might brake the rate at which the Federal Reserve raises U.S. interest rates but stock futures fell on worries about potential profit pain.

Some of the weaker performance reflected a trailing off of October's heavy construction activity in Southeastern states after four hurricanes swept through the region.

Only 11,000 construction jobs were added last month, compared with 65,000 in October. October's construction gain was the strongest since March 2000.

Manufacturing employment posted a third successive monthly drop in November, losing 5,000 jobs after what had appeared to be the beginning of a recovery in the hard-hit sector earlier this year.

The report showed some 16,000 retail jobs were lost in November -- a tally that surprised analysts since the vital Thanksgiving-to-Christmas holiday sales season generally sees retailers adding to their job rosters.