A standard jobs report and an odd one.

I'm David Brancaccio. The latest numbers on Friday show job creation was weaker than expected in January.

That's from counting payrolls. But the survey of households finds the unemployment rate falling slightly.

And there were revisions showing 100,000 more people got jobs in the last two months of last year than first thought.

Marketplaces Kaylee Wells explains.

Revisions are normal, but economist Corey Staley with Indeed.com says there's another reason this one was so big.

Revisions tend to be more common when there are shocks or kind of climate disruptions that impact the data collection.

Hurricane Milton devastated the Gulf Coast in October of last year.

And as a result, you know, the jobs numbers were hit there, but also I would imagine some of the reporting in the following months was also impacted as well.

So it sounds like good news that there are 100,000 more jobs added than previously thought,

but...

I'm not seeing at the macro level things to suggest that the labor market is accelerating.

Pavlina Cherneva isn't ready to call it a turnaround.

She's president of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College.

We knew that the labor market was slowing down, and so a couple of months of positive news

doesn't seem to show a turnaround in trend.

Cherneva says long-term trends still tell the same story.

The percentage of people in the labor force has been stagnant in 2024.

And in the past two years, the number of people staying unemployed for at least six months has gone up.

I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

Our team is watching for confirmation.

The administration will raise tariffs on steel and aluminum by another 25%. Canada, Mexico, and Brazil sell the most of those metals to the U.S., the chief executive of the Canadian province of Quebec, a major aluminum exporter, asked if the U.S. preferred instead to get its steel from China. And as a cost-cutting measure, President Trump doesn't want to make sense.

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