As Washington dusts off another round of snow, the Labor Department is scheduled to release the monthly jobs figures Friday at 8:30 a.m. These February numbers already had a high hurdle to beat last month's report, and severe weather and disruptions from the work slowdown at West Coast ports also could have weighed on the labor market.
The latest snowfall has delayed government agencies' opening by two hours on Friday. The Labor Department has said it will make every effort to put the data on its website at 8:30 a.m. or soon thereafter.
Economists are forecasting payrolls rose by 235,000 last month as the jobless rate declined to 5.6 percent, matching a more than six-year low. Here are a few more things to look for in the report:

1. Wage growth

The first payrolls report of the year showed the biggest gain in average hourly earnings since 2008, so economists will be eager to see whether February will provide more evidence that the highly anticipated pickup in wages is finally here for good. A recent rash of announcements from retail chains such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and TJX Cos. that they're boosting wages adds to the expectation that the rebound has arrived.
January's 0.5 percent increase in earnings could be
difficult to replicate since it in part reflected a rebound from an unexpectedly abysmal 0.2 percent drop the prior month. The 2.2 percent year-over-year advance through January was the fastest since August, while still not representing a break-out from the norm in this expansion:
 "We want to start seeing a lot of the things that are already starting to happen in the real world — the Wal-Mart announcement followed by the TJMaxx announcement — take hold in the economic data we see," said Jacob Oubina, a senior U.S. economist at RBC Capital Markets LLC.
Oubina and his colleagues at RBC track a measure they call the "wage pie" that combines headcount, hours and hourly pay. It's at a high for the expansion and he's optimistic about the potential for paychecks to keep mounting in the months ahead. Solid growth for incomes will support "pretty impressive" consumer spending for the rest of the year, Oubina said.

2. Job gains

Payroll growth has been on a tear the past few months, with the 336,330 three-month average through January marking the best such stretch since the end of 1997. Sustaining that pace of gains is a tall order, which is why economists are forecasting a less-robust reading for February, according to the Bloomberg survey median.
If hiring matches the consensus in the Bloomberg survey, and revisions to the prior two months don't spoil the trend, February would mark 12 consecutive months of payroll gains of 200,000 or more. That's a streak that was last achieved in the 19 months ended March 1995.

3. Labor force flows

An army of job-seeking Americans — 1.05 million — entered the workforce in January, the biggest surge since January 2000, and 759,000 of them secured employment. The inflow pushed the labor force participation rate up to 62.9 percent from 62.7 percent, which matched the lowest in decades.
The bar is high for a repeat of those kinds of numbers since the January figures also included new Census estimates on the size of the population.
The number of Americans still waiting on the sidelines of the labor market, combined with the recent surge in hiring, give some economists faith that there will be a steady flow of job-seekers and job-finders in the labor market in the months ahead.
"I remain quite optimistic that there's a large number to still re-join the labor market yet, and as long as we keep creating 200,000 a month, we're going to be finding those people jobs and there's going to be room for more people to come back in," said Tara Sinclair, an associate professor of economics at George Washington University and chief economist at Indeed, a search engine for online job postings.

4. Gauges of slack

Just a glance at Janet Yellen's dashboard of labor-market indicators will show why the Federal Reserve chair still is intently monitoring some underlying measures of health in the employment picture. Several measures of slack, including underemployment and long-term unemployment, have remained elevated even as overall hiring has improved.
The so-called U-6 or "underemployment" rate edged up to 11.3 percent in January — still a blemish for the economy if you consider that the measure averaged 8.8 percent in the four years leading up to the last recession. This gauge includes workers such as those in part-time roles who would take full-time gigs.
Against the unemployment rate with which we are all familiar, called the U-3 rate, you can see why policy makers are eager for evidence that underemployment is receding more quickly:
Long-term unemployment, too, remains far above the historical norm. As of January, 31.5 percent of the jobless had been out of work for 27 weeks or longer. While down from a recession peak of 45.5 percent, that's more than twice the 15.3 percent average in data back to 1948.
"There's still a lot of slack," Sinclair said. "That's why wages have remained low."put the data on its website.