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| - The US unemployment rate dropped to 6.3 percent in January but the economy added only 49,000 jobs as the coronavirus pandemic continued to hamper business, the Labor Department said on Friday. The January increase came after the world's largest economy saw a contraction in hiring in December, but the government noted that continued job losses in sectors like leisure and hospitality, retail trade, health care and transportation undermined the gains. The decrease in the unemployment rate -- it stood at 6.7 percent in December -- continued a recovery that began after it spiked to 14.7 percent last April after businesses shut down to stop Covid-19 from spreading. It has declined in the months since then, but the January data includes disquieting evidence of continued high unemployment, and the Labor Department said the workforce is overall 6.5 percent smaller, or 9.9 million positions, below where it was in February before the pandemic. William Spriggs, chief economist of the AFL-CIO trade union federation, pointed to the slight increase in the number of people who are long-term unemployed to just over four million, or 39.5 percent of all unemployed people. "These show it will be very hard to get the unemployment number down. We need help now to slow that growth," he tweeted. Congress has passed trillions of dollars in stimulus spending since the pandemic struck to keep the world's largest economy afloat and expand its unemployment safety net, and President Joe Biden has proposed another $1.9 trillion measure. cs/dw
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