The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that the economy grew by 192,000 jobs in February. Except for a boost from temporary hiring by the Census last spring, it was the best seasonally adjusted gain since March 2007. The private sector added 222,000 jobs while local and state government cut jobs by 30,000. Since their peak in September 2008, state and local governments have shed 377,000 jobs.
The unemployment rate, calculated from data collected in a separate survey, fell to 8.9 percent. The number of officially unemployed fell to 13.7 million.
An alternative measure that includes people with part-time jobs who want to work full time and a portion of discouraged workers fell to 15.9 percent. The labor force participation rate was unchanged at 64.2 percent, the employment-population ratio at 58.4 percent. The number of Americans who have been unemployed for six months or more fell from 6.2 million to 6 million.
Chart by Calculated Risk
Revisions today significantly raised job gains reported in December from 121,000 to 152,000 and in January from 36,000 to 63,000.
Today's report showed vast improvement over February 2009 when 726,000 jobs were lost and last February when the loss was 35,000. The unemployment rate was 8.2 percent in February 2009, and 9.7 percent a year ago.
If job creation were to hold steady at the level announced today, the same number of Americans that were working in December 2007 when the Great Recession began would again be at work by July 2014.
“The labor market is improving, job gains are accelerating,” Richard DeKaser, an economist at Parthenon Group in Boston, said before the report. “It’s very clear weather was a factor in the depressed January results. The smart way to look at this is to combine January and February and divide by two.”
Calculating on his advice, the economy averaged 127,000 a month for those two months. Add in December and the average rises to 135,000 a month.
David Leonhardt at The New York Times Economix blog writes:
As we’ve noted before, the Labor Department’s monthly estimate of employment changes is often too pessimistic in the early stages of a recovery (and too optimistic in the early stages of a downturn). The department tends to underestimate how many new businesses are starting as the economy picks up.
There’s no way to know whether that is happening now, but there are reasons to suspect it might be. The other main survey the department does is of households, rather than businesses. It has a smaller sample size and so usually is not as accurate as the survey of businesses. At turning points, though, the household survey can detect changes before the business survey does. As Floyd Norris has explained, the numbers from the business survey may well end up being revised later on — as more accurate data on start-ups flows in — and looking more like the sunnier household survey.
Today’s report clearly raises the odds that we’re in the middle of such a period now. Average job growth over the past three months has been only 102,000, according to the survey of businesses. But it’s been 221,000 — significantly more than population growth — according to the survey of households.
Among other findings in the BLS report:
• Unemployment rates for adult men — 8.7 percent; adult women — 8 percent; teenagers — 23.9 percent, whites — 8.0 percent; blacks — 15.3 percent; and Latinos — 11.6 percent; Asians — 6.8 percent (not seasonally adjusted).
• Number of people working part time involuntarily (who would prefer full-time work): 8.3 million
• Individuals not in the labor force who wanted and were available for work and sought jobs in the past 12 months but not the past four weeks: 2.7 million
• Manufacturing employment: 33,000
• Transportation and warehousing employment: 22,000
• Construction employment: 34,000.
• Professional and business services: 47,000
• Employment in health care services: 34,000
• Retail trade employment: -11,700
• The average workweek for production and non-supervisory workers was unchanged at 34.2 hours.
• The average hourly earnings for all employees on private
nonfarm payrolls increased by 1 cent, or 0.4 percent, to $22.87.