The country’s unemployment rate crept up last month to 6.7 per cent from 6.6 per cent, primarily because more people were looking for work, the agency said. About 29,700 retail jobs were cut in March, and the vast majority were from department stores that sell everything from furniture to vegetables. It was barely half the previous month’s gain.
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The report found that while 95 per cent of the new jobs created last month were full-time, 95 per cent of them were also self-employed positions. In March, a major winter storm hammered the Northeast during the time the Labor Department conducted its surveys of hiring for the month.
The employment rate rose to 65 per cent last month from 64.4 per cent past year.
The manufacturing sector added 11,000 jobs in March after a strong month of hiring in February that had been partly attributed to unusually warm weather.
Construction jobs increased 6,000 after robust gains in January and February. Temporary help employment was up 3.8% y/y, with monthly job gains averaging approximately 9,200 over the past 12 months. The labour force rose last month while the number of people claiming unemployment fell.
That’s down from a peak in 2010 of 17.1 percent. But wage growth has been relatively flat since the recession despite the steady increase in jobs. Companies are adding workers at the same pace they did past year. Consumers actually slowed their spending in January and February, when adjusted for inflation.
Wage gains for nonsupervisory workers rose 4 cents to $21.90 in March.
“No one should be obsessed with a single jobs report”, says Megan Greene, chief economist at Manulife Mutual Funds.
Businesses adding full-time work over part-time jobs “tends to suggest they are very confident about the foreseeable future for their businesses”, Duguid said.
Still, there remain some signs of slack in the economy, with hourly wages of permanent employees up just 0.9 percent from March 2016.
Alberta labour analysts say the unemployment rate here failed to drop because almost 25,000 men and women joined or rejoined the labour force. This is mostly good news for women, who saw their unemployment rate drop from 4.3 percent to 4 percent. Retailers including J.C. Penney and Macy’s have announced thousands of layoffs as they shift toward online sales and scale back on brick-and-mortar operations. Clothiers let go of 5,800.
Economists surveyed by Reuters expected companies to add 180,000 jobs during the month and economists surveyed by Bloomberg expected 175,000 new jobs. It was a mixed report in some aspects and weak in others.
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Construction workers assemble scaffolding during renovations on an office building in downtown Washington, Friday, April 7, 2017. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed over the month at 1.7 million and accounted for 23.3 percent of the unemployed.
