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The Bureau of Labor Statistics released employment numbers for March today and found that both the unemployment rate, at 8.8 percent, and the number of Americans without jobs, at 13.5 million, stayed the same from the previous month. Most of the important indicators were unchanged from February, but, overall, it's a slightly better picture than November, notes the BLS. But other important things remain the same: The economic situation is still worse for the young than it is for adults, and worse for African Americans and Hispanics than it is for whites and Asians: The teenage unemployment rate was 24.5 percent, the rate for blacks was 15.5 percent, and for Hispanics it was 11.3 percent. That showed little change in March. One factor did shift, however:
In March, 2.4 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, up slightly from a year earlier. (These data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.A slight increase in people giving up on jobs isn't a good thing. Overall, though, things seem to be going as predicted. We have a slow, relatively jobless recovery, and, as always, the situation is much worse if you're not white.
