There's a lot to find in this month's jobs report, depending on what you're looking for. If you're looking for good news, like White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, this is the biggest job growth in three years -- some 162,000 new jobs. (Even if you discount the 48,000 census employees across the country, this still remains a substantial increase over prior months.) You might note, as White House Economic Adviser Christina Romer does, that "the labor force has increased by 1.1 million since December 2009 and employment has increased by 1.4 million."
If you're looking for trouble, you look at the actual unemployment rates; they have held steady now for the first three months of the year. The regular unemployment number remains at 9.7 percent of the labor force, as it has since January, and the all-important U-6 number -- which measures all workers affected by unemployment by including people who have stopped looking for jobs and those who have been forced to work fewer hours -- sits at 16.7, a bit higher than the previous two months combined. Economists forecast these numbers will continue through the end of 2010.
Above, I posted the latest version of Calculated Risk's useful graph. Are we finally hitting the bottom of the trough? It's hard to tell, but the first quarter GDP growth numbers will give us more of an idea of what to expect going forward, including a sense of how far the labor market's growth is lagging behind that of the larger economy. Those who worry about a jobless recovery, though, will find plenty of reasons to be nervous, especially with the continuing increase in productivity, even though, as Dean Baker points out, that may not be the best measure to analyze.
-- Tim Fernholz
