The United States added 178,000 jobs in March, blowing past expectations and showing a resilient labor market just as the war with Iran began escalating, sending up oil prices.
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The unemployment rate fell to 4.3% last month, down from 4.4%. The gains were concentrated in health care, construction, transportation and warehousing.
Despite the outsized headline figure, there were further indications that the job market remains wobbly. Wage growth declined to 3.5% in March from 3.8% in February, falling short of forecasts.
Jobs report estimates from January and February were also revised, upward and downward respectively. Combined, they show that U.S. payrolls fell by a net 7,000 over those two months.
The labor force participation rate, or the share of the overall population either employed or looking for work, fell to its lowest level since November of 2021.
“While this month’s jobs report delivered an upside surprise, we continue to believe that risks to the labor market remain elevated and higher oil prices from the Iran conflict could prove an additional impediment in the months ahead,” Scott Helfstein, head of investment strategy at Global X financial group, said in a note to clients.
Surveys conducted by the BLS for this report were completed by March 12. At the time, the full brunt of the war had yet to hit the job market.
Three weeks later, gasoline prices have surged to more than $4 a gallon, a level that, if it is sustained, would sap U.S. consumers of hundreds of dollars in annual discretionary income.
On Wednesday, the Atlanta Federal Reserve lowered its real-time gross domestic product estimate to 1.9%, down from more than 3% just before the start of the war.
On Tuesday, the BLS reported the hiring rate in February fell to just 3.1% of the U.S. workforce, a level last recorded in April 2020, as the Covid pandemic bore down.
Job openings also fell in February, though they appear to be stabilizing overall. The rate of layoffs also remains at an all-time low.
Meanwhile, many Americans’ views of the economy and Trump’s handling of it continue to sink to new depths.
A CNN poll out this week found that just 31% of respondents approved of how Trump is managing U.S. economic performance, with just 27% saying they approved of his handling of inflation, down from 44% a year ago. His overall approval rating appears to have stabilized at about 35%.
A debate is now underway about how many jobs the U.S. would need to add each month to keep the unemployment rate — 4.3% as of Friday — stable.
Over the past year, a massive drop in overall immigration to the U.S., coupled with a growing number of baby boomers leaving the workforce, mean fewer overall jobs need to be created for the economy to absorb newcomers to the labor force and keep the overall unemployment rate steady, according to economists with the Dallas Federal Reserve.
That overall number of new jobs needed is known as the “breakeven” employment rate. The economists wrote in a note published this week that the breakeven employment rate now may be close to zero.
If the overall workforce continues to shrink, even fewer new jobs will be needed to incorporate workers entering the labor force, such as recent college graduates or parents who put their careers on hold for a few years.
That won’t necessarily make looking for a job any easier. The median spell of unemployment is now about 2½ months, with the average much longer — about six months. About 25% of all unemployed workers are out of work for at least 27 weeks.
