The BLS released the February jobs report on Friday, March 4th, 2011 and it finally showed some improvement in private sector job creation. The report shows that non farm payrolls increase by 192,000 and increase several major economic sectors. Job gains occurred in manufacturing, construction, services, health care and transportation and warehousing.
The employment rate dropped 0.1% to 8.9%. The unemployment rate has dropped 0.9% since November 2010. The black unemployment rate dropped to 15.3% and the Hispanic rate moved down to 11.6%.
The basic unemployment rate(U-3) was 8.9 percent. Down almost one percentage point in the last three months. However a big part of the drop was due to people leaving the labor force.
The labor participation stayed at 64.2% in January 2011. The number of people who are working involuntarily part time also stayed at 8.3 million. The number of marginally attached workers moved up to 2.7 millon (from 2.5 million a year ago). And in a sign that people have left the labor force, there were 184,000 discouraged workers (1.0 million).
Now for the good news, the Non-Farm payroll grew by 192,000 jobs with the private sector creation 222,000 jobs and the state and local governments losing 30,000. The biggest gains were in construction(33K)[I haven’t said that in a while], durable goods manufacturing (+30,000) and transportation up 22,000. In services, the winners were administrative services (+36K) and health services (+34K). Overall, it was a pretty broad jobs picture. The most jobs losses came in the categories of State and local government lost 30,000 jobs and retail lost 8,000.
Non-farm payroll grew by 192,000 which is close to pre-recession job growth.
Below is a graph of the employment increases in non-farm payroll by job category. There were big gains in Whole sale trade, finance and business services. There were also increase in some important categories like construction and manufacturing.
The "Job's Hole" got a little smaller this month with good jobs growth in the private sector. The slow return of jobs has really hurt the middle and lower classes.
As mentioned earlier, the number of people “Not in the Labor Force” increased from 83.876 million in January 2010 to 86.168 million in January 2011 and increase of 2.29 million workers. That’s a huge number of people who are no longer participating in the labor market. The figure includes 6.643 million who want work and 993,000 who are “discouraged”.
People who want work but cannot find it constitute about 15% of the labor force. This groups includes people who are working part-time but want full-time work and people who are marginally attached to the labor force.
While the general unemployment rate (U-3) dropped 0.1% to 8.9%, the Black Unemployment rate was little changed at 15.7%. The rate for Hispanics was 11.9% and teenage unemployment was 26%. Black teenage unemployment was 45%. U-6, the widest measure of unemployment, was 16.1 percent. Basically 16% of the labor force wants to work and cannot.
The standard Black unemployment rates stood at around 15% as measured by the BLS.
The "Real" Black employment edged downward to 22.8% of the Black Population. In other words about 23% of the Black population is unemployed, underemployed or wants work but cannot find it.
Average unemployment duration also increased. The new average duration was 36.9 weeks. However, the old figure from December 2010, 34.2 weeks, is not directly comparable. The BLS will now collect unemployment duration for 5 years rather than two years. The median (half under / half over) decreased to 21.8 weeks. 6.2 Million people (44% of the total) were out of work for more than 27 weeks.
The number of people working part time for economic reasons was approximately 8.4 million. The number of discouraged workers remained at about 1 million. Discouraged workers are people who have not looked in the past 4 weeks because they believe no work is available, could not find work, lack training or employer discrimination.
The ADP employment report on March 3, 2011 which showed an increase of 217,000 new jobs over the January total.
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