The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its report on March employment figures. The good news is that non-farm employment is up by 216, 000, almost 10% more than predicted. The BLS reports 230,000 new private sector jobs, with 14,000 fewer local and state government jobs.
This is the best monthly showing for new jobs (excluding the one-time bump for temporary census workers last spring) since March, 2006. At the same time, the unemployment rate was little changed at 8.8 percent, while the number of unemployed fell to 13.5 million. The "U-6" unemployment rate, which includes people with part-time jobs who want to work full time, as well as a portion of discouraged workers who are no longer looking for work, fell from 15.9 to 15.7 percent. The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased from 6.06 million to 6.26 million.
The bad news is that we're still a long way away from getting back to where we were before the start of The Great Recession. Since December, 2007, we've lost about 8.4 million jobs. At current hiring rates, we won't reach the pre-recession peak level until January of 2014. But, on the whole, I'll take the good news.
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