New US jobs plunge in March
- by Alan Olson
- in Markets
- — Apr 7, 2018
March unemployment held at 4.1%, whereas analysts expected a decline to 4%.
Leisure and hospitality employers added only 5,000 jobs last month, the least since September.
Wage growth increased from February, with average hourly earnings increasing by 0.3% month-on-month and 2.7% year-on-year, in line with what economists had predicted.
After reporting a substantial increase in US employment in the previous month, the Labor Department released a report on Friday showing job growth slowed by much more than anticipated in the month of March. The unemployment rate also remained at 4.1 per cent for the sixth month in a... That was the smallest amount since last September and followed a 326,000 surge in February.
Wage growth accelerated slightly. Still, the expansion has been puzzlingly slow, with economic growth averaging just 2.2 percent a year, about a percentage point below the historical average. However, it's a rather stunning drop from February's breakout numbers and might suggest that recent economic policy moves have employers pulling back on risk.
He added, "Overall, looking through the volatility, employment growth is trending higher and wage growth is starting to heat up".
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The Labor Department said Friday that the unemployment rate remained 4.1 percent, a 17-year low, for a sixth straight month.
But the firm expects growth to rebound to a decent 3.1 percent annual pace in the current April-June quarter.
Businesses have stepped up their spending on manufactured goods, helping lift factory output. Last month, some hailed a massive return to the civilian workforce suggested by the jobs report, with the Household survey adding 806,000 to the workforce and showing that 653,000 left the "not in labor force" statuses in February.
Americans have spent less at retail chains in the past two months, after shopping at a healthy pace during the winter holiday season.
A broader measure of unemployment, which includes people who want to work but have given up searching and those working part time because they can not find full-time employment, fell two-tenths of a percentage point to 8.0 percent last month.
This story was written by the Associated Press.
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