“WASHINGTON — The U.S. economy got its best jobs report in three years Friday as employers added 162,000 nonfarm jobs in March.” One newswire stated on the Jobs and Employment News updates.
Encouraging as the Labor Department might seem to sound, and it might, it wasn’t strong enough to bring down the unemployment rate. Additionally, the jobless figure remained stuck at 9.7 percent for the third month in a row and during a rather painful 2nd quarter for small to medium businesses among other things amid a surge of people returning to the labor market.
As the overall economy struggles to recover from the worst economic crisis in more than 50 years. And with the Health Care Act on the table and dividing the country, President Obama is still yet to perform on his pledge to America to turn things around.
Economists, mindful of continuing problems and uncertainty, were generally cautious in assessing the employment gain.
Some of the news quotes around the country are stating:
“Having lost 8.2 million jobs over a period of two years, it’s a drop in the bucket,” said Bart van Ark, chief economist at The Conference Board, a business-membership and research organization in New York. “It’s too early to say we have a sustainable recovery.”
Part of the concern stems from the fact it’s hard to pinpoint specific areas of the economy with the potential to send employment rocketing upward.
The housing industry, long a staple of economic growth, remains troubled, as does construction, architecture and small businesses. Overall, everyone is hurting in a phase of economic stress where some sectors are depressed, others recessed and overall the economy cannot seem to make up it’s mind where to turn. And to make matters worse, this is working its way through tax time, a ‘slow time of the year’ for a number of market sectors.
And, while manufacturing and exports have helped pull the economy out of its nosedive, as it appears in some sections of the country, they still face long-term problems of global competition and currency barriers. And the overall effects of this ‘turn around’ remains to be see across the board in the U.S. Economy thus far.
One news source has stated:
“Analysts reckon the economy needs to create 125,000 or so new net jobs a month just to keep pace with the population growth, but depending on how fast people pour into the labor market, many more jobs than that will be needed to cut into the unemployment rate.
Still, van Ark said, March was “the first month of really solid growth” in a long time. ‘We can be a little bit more optimistic.’”
Adding to the evidence of a slowly stabilizing economy, government statisticians also revised jobs data for the previous two months, turning January’s 26,000 jobs lost into a gain of 14,000 jobs that month, and February’s 36,000 job losses were revised to only 14,000. Which seems a bit more hopeful.
President Obama treated Friday’s government jobs report as good, if not great, news while speaking to factory workers in North Carolina. Which all seems a bit hopeful, word on the street counters otherwise in some States of the Union.
“I’ve often had to report bad news during the course of this year … But today is an encouraging day,” he said. “This month, more Americans woke up, got dressed and headed to work in an office, a factory, a storefront. More folks are feeling the sense of pride and satisfaction that comes with a hard-earned and deserved paycheck.” As per one news source.
Obama spoke to employees of Celgard at a meeting recently. They are a Charlotte manufacturer of lithium ion batteries used in the hybrid vehicles that help form the basis of the president’s clean-energy plans. The plant had received stimulus money and is hiring 300 more workers shortly. Which is a good sign of positive government intervention, however some sectors of the auto industry supply chain that were up for some time are now starting to feel the crunch.
“Next time somebody asks you at the grocery store, ‘What did the Recovery Act do?’ you can tell them one of the things it helped do is expand … an entire industry,” Obama said.
Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist for forecaster IHS Global Insight, said the economy had crossed an important barrier, though challenges remained. The story continued.
“Until this month, the most that we could say was that it looked like job growth was about to turn the corner. Now it seems to have done so. But it will be a long slog to bring down the unemployment rate,” he said in a research note.
Nationally, the census will be a steady job creator for several months. The Commerce Department expects to hire at least 600,000 temporary workers this year to staff the decennial survey. However this is only a temporary job, government based and has no major effect on the economy that touches home in the U.S.
Another indicator of future hiring, the temporary-help sector, added 40,000 workers last month, boosting its increase since September to 313,000. As is the news regarding employers hiring more contractors. Full time employment still stagnates.
Financial services and the information industry lost jobs in March, which is no small wonder at all, but health-care, education, retail and the leisure-industry employers all added to their payrolls. With the addition of retail and leisure, we can see some light in the tunnel of the dim economy news that has been plaguing the newswires to date.
Additionally, even the hard-hit construction sector ended its long string of severe job losses last month, adding 15,000 jobs. Showing reasonable signs of positive adjustment, however, this does not come as news to myself, after having done a lot of research and working on setting up the online resources for such trend adjustments in the Job and Employment market. Further, we just don’t know how long standing or stable this adjustment will be.
Stay tuned. The economy is working, things are changing, it is quite important to stay in touch with the news, blogs, websites and online feedback about the economy and job market. This way you’ll have a better idea of where you fit in and what you can do about your personal career situation.
