The waiting game still is not over, but it may be soon. þþThe nation’s employers added 192,000 jobs in February, up from a gain of 63,000 the previous month, the Labor Department reported on Friday. þþWhile February’s number represented the fastest growth in nearly a year, it was partly the result of a bounce back from unusually depressed hiring in January, when winter weather shuttered offices and factories around the country. Taken together, the job growth for the first two months of 2011 has not been much better than it was last fall. þþStill, economists say they are hopeful that the pace will soon pick up. þþ“Economic recoveries can be like a snowball rolling down a hill, in that it takes time to get some momentum,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “People hesitate until they feel that the recovery’s durable enough, and then they have a tendency to jump in. Maybe we’re finally getting to that jumping-in moment.” þþThe unemployment rate ticked down to 8.9 percent, falling below 9 percent for the first time in nearly two years. This rate, which comes from a separate survey and is based on the total number of Americans who want to work, has remained stubbornly high in the last year despite payroll growth. Altogether, 13.7 million people are still out of work and actively looking. þþEconomists say the unemployment rate may rise temporarily in the next few months, as stronger job growth lures some discouraged workers back into the labor force. Right now the share of working-age population that is actively involved in the work force — that is, either in a job or actively looking for one — is at its lowest level in 25 years, an indication that many Americans are waiting for hiring to get better before resuming the job hunt. þþ“It’s a puzzle, a genuine puzzle why that number has been stuck,” a senior economist at Credit Suisse, Jay Feldman, said. “I expect it to recover somewhat in the coming months as the labor market improves and more people become encouraged about their job prospects.” þþOther recent economic reports — like those on unemployment insurance claims and manufacturing employment — have pointed to stronger demand for workers. The Federal Reserve, in a survey of its 12 districts, noted on Wednesday that the labor market had improved modestly, but the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, told lawmakers that “until we see a sustained period of stronger job creation, we cannot consider the recovery to be truly established.” þþA broader measure of unemployment, which includes people working part-time because they could not find full-time jobs and those so discouraged that they have given up searching, was 15.9 percent in February, down from 16.1 percent in January. þþThe job growth in February was biggest in manufacturing, construction, and professional and business services. The construction numbers were unusually low in January, when the industry shed jobs, probably because of severe snowstorms. þþ“In some cases it’s very hard to judge how big the underlying improvement here is in this data,” said Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight. þþNot every sector added jobs. State and local governments, squeezed by revenue shortfalls and a reluctance to raise taxes, again laid off workers. Local governments have shed 377,000 jobs since September 2008, when their number of employees last peaked. þþFederal employment was flat, but federal employees may also be at risk of significant layoffs if Republican leaders in Congress get the budget cuts they have been pushing for. Economists at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere have warned that such budget cuts could ripple through the economy and lead to layoffs in the private sector. þþ“Cutting necessary investments in our human capital, our infrastructure, and the next generation of scientific and technological advances — as is being debated on Capitol Hill — will only exacerbate the weakness in the labor market both in the short run and long run,” said Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization. þþRising prices for energy and food also remain a risk to job growth, economists say, as they leave less money for consumers and businesses to spend on other purchases that could potentially spur hiring. þþEven when the weather distortions have passed, many economists forecast that job growth later this year will pick up to about 200,000 a month. While this of course would be a welcome development compared with the modest growth in January and the bloodletting during the recession, it still is not fast enough to recover much of the ground lost during the recession. þþSince the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on net, 7.5 million jobs, or about 5.4 percent of its nonfarm payrolls. If from here on out the country adds 200,000 jobs a month, it would take more than three years for the economy to regain the employment levels it had before the recession. And that does not take into account the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow — meaning that if the economy were healthy, it would have more jobs today than we had before the recession. þþ
Source: NY Times
