“We’ve got a real strong job market going”, Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust, told the New York Times.
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The unemployment rate, which is derived from a separate Labor Department survey of households, showed that the labor force expanded by more than a half million people and nearly all found work.
Friday’s jobs report is sure to be closely monitored by the Federal Reserve and presidential candidates as a gauge of how well the economy is extending its 6½-year rebound from the Great Recession.
Also encouraging is that job gains for December and January were revised up by a total 30,000.
“This is the second consecutive month we’ve seen the labor force grow with the strong economy”, Michael Madowitz, an economist with the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP), said in an e-mailed statement. The unemployment rate as expected held at an eight-year low of 4.9 percent. Then worries over rising prices of gas, deep debt held by consumers and government layoffs were the headlines in the papers. Black and Hispanic Americans had unemployment rates of 8.8 percent and 5.4 percent respectively, with whites at 4.3 percent.
Oil prices might still be the cause of ulcers, but it is the producers feeling today’s pain due to the prices being so low. “But as far as the Fed is concerned, it is already seeing a clear acceleration in core price inflation”.
In other words, they were low paying and low quality, and this has been much of the case for the last seven years. For example, almost 9,000 jobs disappeared from the retail sector as stores sent home holiday workers. Retailers added almost 55,000 jobs. As unemployment has dropped, more companies have begun to raise pay to attract workers, thereby fueling more hiring as people’s ability to spend, invest and save has increased. The participation rate stalled in recent months, so the slight increase could be a good indication of positive growth.
Keep in mind small businesses have historically been the job creators in the U.S. Currently, the number of small business closures outpaces the number of start-ups by over 100,000 annually. And the number of discouraged workers and individuals not counted in the labor force, many because they’ve given up on trying to find a job, both fell over the month.
Average hourly earnings declined by 3 cents an hour to $25.35, the largest drop since 2014.
But Pantheon Macroeconomics’ Ian Shepherdson noted that wage growth is consistently underestimated for February because of a calendar quirk where payday – the 15th of the month – falls outside the employment survey week. The average hourly work week also declined 0.2 hours to 34.4. This is the highest percentage recorded since January of 2015.
“The one soft spot in the report was wage growth”. In February, these people accounted for 27.7 percent of the unemployed. That’s down from 2.5% in the prior month.
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The figure is still historically low, but now has risen for three straight months.
