US employers added 215,000 in March, after a revised 245,000 gain in non-farm payrolls in February, according to a monthly job growth report published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The unemployment rate, which is obtained from a separate survey of US households, rose from 4.9 per cent in February to 5 per cent, half its crisis-era peak. The rate stood at 7.8 per cent when Barack Obama took office in January 2009.
Revisions to the previous two months’ readings subtracted a total of 1,000 jobs. The US economy created on average 209,000 jobs a month in the January-March period. The solid pace of job creation indicates that worries about weaker global growth and market turmoil of the first two months of 2016, didn’t have a big impact on hiring.
The labour-force participation rate – which indicates the share of working-age Americans who are either employed or actively looking for work – rose by 0.1 percentage point to 63 per cent as 396,000 people became more optimistic and entered, or re-entered the labour-force. The measure, which bottomed out at 62.4 per cent in September 2015, is now at the highest level since March 2014, but well below where it was before the Great Recession began in December 2007. The labour-force participation rate is set to rise further as the labour market strengthens.
The number of Americans working part-time for economic reasons – those individuals who would like to work full-time but have been able to secure only part-time work – rose by 135,000 to 6.1 million. This development suggests that some people who joined the labour-force were unable to secure full-time employment. The broader measure of unemployment – which includes marginally-attached to the labour-force and those working part-time for economic reasons – rose to 9.8 per cent from 9.7 per cent in February.
The number of long-term unemployed – those individuals who have been out of work for 27 weeks or more – rose by 48,000 to 2.2 million.
Retailers took on 47,700 workers, bringing the 12-month gain to 378,000. The leisure and hospitality sector gained 40,000 jobs. Construction employment grew by 37,000, the most in three months. Professional and business services added 33,000. The manufacturing sector lost 29,000 jobs, after a loss of 18,000 jobs in February, the worst-hit sector of the economy. The integration of low business-cost markets into the global economy and technological advances have had a negative effect on US manufacturing employment over the past four decades. The mining and logging sector, which includes energy companies, shed 12,000 jobs. Government employment rose by 20,000.
Average hourly earnings of private-sector workers rose 0.3 per cent from a month earlier to 25.43 dollars. Year-on-year wage growth was 2.3 per cent. Wages are rising faster than inflation at present, but wage growth is not strong enough to push inflation closer to the Fed’s target of 2 per cent. The US central bank predicts to reach its inflation target in 2018.
The average workweek for private workers was unchanged, at 34.4 hours.
Last month, the Fed kept its target range for the federal funds rate unchanged, at 0.25 per cent to 0.5 per cent and suggested two quarter-point increases over 2016. At its December policy-meeting, the Fed predicated four quarter-point rises this year.
photo: Peter Burka / CC BY-SA 2.0
