Only 98000 New Jobs Were Created In March, Labor Department Says

98,000 new jobs is clearly disappointing, but should not be viewed as a sudden deterioration in the trend of employment growth.

The unemployment rate fell because almost a half-million more Americans reported finding jobs, the Labor Department said.

Among the demographic groups of working people, the unemployment rates for adult women (4.0%), white people (3.9%) and Hispanic people (5.1%) declined in March. Thomas jobless rate fell to 6 per cent in March, down from 6.2 per cent the month before. Retail trade (-30K), on the other hand, contracted markedly for the second straight month.

LaSalle Network chief executive Tom Gimbel comments, “Companies that are growing want to hire really good people, and when you have an unemployment rate under 5 percent, there’s a shortage of them”.

In the past three months, employers have added an average of 178,000 jobs a month. The bureau counts those not in the labor force as people who do not have a job and did not actively seek one in the past four weeks. The number of discouraged workers was 460,000, down from a year earlier. The data are not seasonally adjusted. The government revised its estimates of job gains for January and February downward by a total of 38,000. Over the month, job gains occurred in services to buildings and dwellings (+17,000) and in architectural and engineering services (+7,000).

This comes as the overall USA economy added only 98,000 jobs last month, substantially less than the 180,000 new jobs forecast by economists and well below gains of more than 200,000 jobs in both January and February.

But with inflation rising and the unemployment rate below the most recent Fed median forecast for full employment, economists expect another interest rate increase in June. In March, retail lost 29,700 jobs.

Temporary help was a bright spot within a monthly employment report that mostly underwhelmed, showing a gain above its trailing-12-month average and continuing to accelerate on a year-over-year basis.

The “real” unemployment rate, otherwise known as the U-6 measure, was 9.2 percent in February, which dropped to 8.9 percent in March.

Still, compared with its peak in the early 2000s, the manufacturing sector has about 630,000 fewer jobs, a drop of 27 per cent, Statistics Canada said. That number seems small on the surface, but average hourly earnings have risen by 68 cents (a gain of 2.7%) from a year ago. For private-sector production workers and employees who aren’t in supervisory positions, the average hourly wage rose to $21.90 – a 4-cent gain.