December's job results were rather disappointing, and one of the main reasons for this seems to be the unusually cold winter last week, all throughout the time when the Bureau of Labor Statistics did its counting and calculation of figures.

The BLS survey of households, which is used to calculate the rate of unemployment, revealed that as many as 283,000 people were "not at work for weather reasons" during the very cold December 07 week, which was the highest number recorded in the category since 2005.

While these people are still counted as being employed, the raised level does seem to hint that there were abnormal weather effects that were not considered by the bureau's seasonal adjustments.

For example, it is possible that the cold in December might have been responsible for triggering more than the usual number of seasonal job cuts in outdoor employments, especially construction, which ended up losing nearly 53,000 additional jobs during the month of December.

"From a weather standpoint, the situation actually looks quite similar to December 2005, when employment registered a well-below-trend performance", said David Greenlaw of Morgan Stanley.