Posted May. 2, 2008
WASHINGTON – U.S. non-farm payrolls last month slowed their decline, shrinking by 20,000 jobs after losing a revised 81,000 jobs in March, U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said today.
Although the BLS described employment as “little changed,” April’s month-over-month decline was the fourth in a row and followed a loss of 240,000 jobs in the first quarter. (READ MORE) Yet, the bureau noted, “the over-the-year percentage change … continues to slow. In fact, the rate has declined over each of the last six months.” Compared with the same month of 2007, total non-farm employment fell 0.3 percent in April after falling 0.4 percent in March.
Analysts had expected a loss of 75,000 jobs would follow March’s previously reported 80,000-job decline, based on the median forecast from a Bloomberg News survey of 82 economists.
“Obviously, a negative number is still negative,” Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services in Boston, said on Bloomberg Television. “But it is still so close to zero that essentially it means flat.”
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate nationwide fell to 5 percent from March’s 5.1 percent, also surprising analysts.
“Both the number of unemployed persons (7.6 million) and the unemployment rate (5.0 percent) were little changed in April,” BLS Commissioner Keith Hall noted this morning in his address to Congress. “Over the past 12 months, the jobless rate has risen by 0.5 percentage point and the number of unemployed individuals has risen by 797,000.
“Although the number of unemployed persons who had been searching for work for 27 weeks or more increased by 160,000, their share of total unemployment changed little. Over the month, the number of persons who were unemployed due to job loss was little changed, at 4.0 million, but was up by 698,000 from a year earlier. These job losers accounted for 53 percent of all unemployed persons in April, up from 49 percent 12 months earlier,” Hall said.
The service-providing sector gained 90,000 jobs last month, led by hiring in education and health services (gaining 52,000 jobs compared with March, 37,000 of them in health services) and professional and business services (+39,000).
“Retail trade experienced the only significant job loss” in the sector, the BLS said, losing 27,000 jobs compared with March and 137,000 jobs compared with the sector’s peak employment in March 2007. In fact, financial services firms added 3,000 jobs in April, after paring 4,000 in March, in their first month-over-month payroll gain since July.
But the goods-producing sector lost 110,000 jobs in April, led by employment declines in construction (-61,000), both residential and other; and manufacturing (-46,000), mostly of durable goods.
The nation’s average work week fell 0.1 hours, or 0.4 percent, to 33.7 hours. The manufacturing work week shrank by 0.3 hours to 40.9 hours, while average manufacturing overtime declined 0.1 hour per week to 3.9 hours.
Average hourly earnings edged up 1 cent, or 0.06 percent, to $17.88 – lagging the Bloomberg survey’s forecast of a 0.3-percent gain – in what the BLS called the smallest change since May 2006. Compared with a year ago, hourly earnings rose 3.4 percent.
“We are in a recession – this report doesn’t change that,” Ellen Zentner, an economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, told Bloomberg News. “What it does is support the idea that the downturn will be mild. Consumer spending isn’t going to tank.”
Additional information, including the 28-page Employment Situation summary and the BLS Commissioner’s Statement on the Employment Situation release, is available from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics at www.bls.gov.
