March NFP Rises Less than Expected

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday that the US payrolls had increased by 162,000 jobs in March, this was fewer than analysts had estimated by around 30,000 less jobs. The unemployment rate wasn’t changed at 9.7% for the third straight month. The 2010 US Census was a big contributor to the positive number as 48,000 temporary workers have been hired by the Federal Government.

Barry Ritholtz has a breakdown of the negatives and positives of March’s NFP report

Negatives
• Average Hourly Earnings of all employees NFP fell by 2 cents, or 0.1%.
• Unemployment rate is unchanged at 9.7% (no improvement this month)
• Long-term unemployed (jobless for 27 weeks+) increased by 414,000 to 6.5 million. (bad)
• 44.1 percent of unemployed persons were jobless for 27 weeks +. (Also very bad)
• Involuntary part-time workers increased to 9.1 million in March. (This remains a stubborn problem area)

Positives
• Average workweek was up by 0.1 hour to 34.0 hours in March.
• Temp help services added 40,000 jobs in March. That’s a cumulative add of 313k since September 2009.
• Census added “only” 48,000 workers — far below the 100-150k consensus. This pushes their hiring out into the rest of the year.
• Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate at 64.9% edged up in March
• Manufacturing continued to trend up (+17,000); Mfr added 45,000 jobs in Q1.
• Revisions: January 2010 data was revised upwards 40k (from-26k to +14k); February was revised up 22k (from -36k to -14k).

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