Video: Unemployment rate drops to four-year low

>>> new job numbers suggest the economy slowly is continuing to grow. the unemployment rate now stands at 7.7%. that is actually the lowest it's been in four years. kayla is here to help us wade through some of these latest figures. good morning.

>> good morning, erica.

>> there was some question before these numbers came out about what the impact would be on black friday, and then on the negative side, sandy. what was the outcome?

>> we thought sandy was going to pummel these job numbers in a big way. thankfully, that did not happen. where it may have had some effects is taking people out of the labor force . what that means is the jobs number, the unemployment figure is the number of people who are employed out of the number who are looking for work. many people were telling us we're devoting our time to rebuilding our lives and our homes. we're not going to look for jobs right now. we can do that after the start of the year. so we saw the unemployment rate came down, because 350,000 people took themselves out of the work force . but on the positive side, black friday was such a boom for jobs. retail singularly the biggest factor in jobs being added. 53,000 jobs in the retail space added just in november, and the good news is companies like target often keep a lot of those seasonal employees up to half and full-time so. that could could be a real nonseasonal adjustment.

>> that could be a real boost. 146,000 jobs added. there's still some talk about this being a sluggish recovery. you touched on some of those points. one of the biggest issues is the so called millennials. their unemployment numbers are much higher.

>> when you think about an 18-year-old looking for a job. we are about three years past the recession, but for the last four years when they've been in the job force able to get a job, when they've been looking, it's either been a recession or a recovery. it's really hard to change that encouragement to make teens think okay, eventually this will turn around. it puts an added burden on the parent to help pay for some of the things that teens would otherwise be paying for. the other thing is you would rather have slow and steady growth. we've had 26 straight months of jobs added. i think a lot of people forget how many jobs were actually lost during the recession. nine million jobs lost. we've only added four million back. so we still are only about halfway back to breaking even on jobs.

Source: http://video.today.msnbc.msn.com/today/50127862/

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