Slip showing

Weather chills employment

EMPLOYERS slammed the brakes on hiring in December as job growth hit its slowest pace in about three years.

Payrolls grew by just 74,000 last month, far below the more than 200,000 seen in the prior two months, the Labor Department said.

Wintery weather in some regions may have been partly to blame, hurt- ing industries like construction.

The unemployment rate dropped to 6.7% — the lowest since October 2008 — from 7% in November. The decline, though, largely reflected more people giving up the hunt for work.

“It doesn’t encourage the kind of optimism we had a month ago,” Pierre Ellis, senior global economist at De- cision Economics, told the Daily News.

While the report doesn’t mean the economy has taken a sudden turn for the worse, “the question is whether this pause is more than temporary,” Ellis said.

There were some bright spots. About 38,000 more jobs were added in November than previously reported. Employment in the retail and man- ufacturing sectors picked up steam.

But the report showed the labor market still has a ways to go after being hit hard in the recession.

The percentage of Americans with jobs or looking for one fell back to a 35-year low of 62.8%.

The average workweek shrank in December, and average hourly earnings over the past 12 months were up just 1.8%.

Jobs were harder to come by in December, thanks partially to bad weather.