It was the same story as last month in the lead up to today's release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report: A couple of weeks of mixed economic news. The report clocked in this morning with the jobless numbers well below the consensus predicted by experts surveyed by Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal: a seasonally adjusted loss of 36,000 nonfarm jobs for February. The headline unemployment rate held steady at 9.7%. U6, the alternative measure that counts underemployed workers and a portion of those out of work Americans too discouraged to look for a job, rose to 16.8%.
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Employment fell in construction, the information industry, transportation and warehousing. Temporary help services, health care and the retail trade added jobs. Severe winter weather may have affected the job statistics, leaving some workers uncounted, but quantifying exactly how many was not possible, the BLS stated. Economists at Macroeconomic Advisers LLC in St. Louis said the bad weather might reduce the payroll count by anywhere from 150,000 to 220,000 workers, according to Bloomberg. That undercount will probably be reversed this month, they said.
Revisions raised lowered the job losses in December from the 150,000 reported last month to 109,000 and boosted the job losses for January from 20,000 to 26,000.
The tally of officially unemployed rose slightly to nearly 14.9 million, with the U6 population of unemployed and underemployed still clocking in at nearly 26 million. The civilian labor force participation rate rose slightly to 64.8 percent in February. The employment-population ratio went from to 58.4 percent in January to 58.5% in February.
The New York Times reported:
The economy is expected to add as many as 100,000 jobs a month later this year. But with businesses still skittish about hiring, and the end of stimulus programs in sight, economists are concerned that the labor market’s slow growth may hamper a recovery.
Those doubts have resurfaced in recent weeks in light of weak economic data. Consumer confidence has waned, and sales of homes have fallen rather sharply. Still, there are signs of a rebound: the manufacturing sector is improving, and businesses appear to be reinvesting in capital.
But without a vibrant jobs market, consumer spending will likely remain tepid, and businesses will continue to rein in costs.
If only 95,000 jobs are added each month in 2010, as the President's Economic Report predicted last month, it would mean a reduction of only slightly more than a million of the 8.4 million jobs lost since the Great Recession began in December 2007. In other words, another oxymoronic "jobless recovery" like the ones that occurred in the two previous recessions.
Various other reports this week maintained a positive trend, including a strong gain year over year in retail sales, factory orders and the Institute for Supply Management's non-manufacturing report. But retail sales are being compared with an especially weak 2009, and are still well below the same period in 2007. Factory orders rose but were below expectations, with a drop in orders for machinery and computers. And the employment index of the ISM report, though continuing its upward run, still indicates non-manufacturing jobs are being lost, just that the losses are far smaller than a year ago. And the negative news of the past two weeks continues to cast a shadow: weaker consumer confidence even as some people seem to be loosening their purse strings: and the drop in home sales. All in all, these reports add up to a who-can-tell kind of conclusion. Both optimists and pessimists have data to make their case, just as has been true since late last spring. One thing remains clear, however, anyone expecting a quick turnaround in the job market will continue to be gravely disappointed.
The BLS report also noted:
• Construction employment declined by another 64,000; manufacturing employment rose 11,000.
• Temporary hiring rose by 48,000.
• Hiring for the Census in January was 15,000.
• The average workweek for production and non-supervisory workers fell to 33.1 hours.
• The number of long-term jobless (27 weeks or longer) fell slightly to 6.1 million.
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SilverOz has a diary on this subject here.