Promising gains in the service industries aren’t resilient enough to lift the country out of its job slump in April
Another Friday has come and gone with news of a decline in U.S. jobs. For the fourth month in a row, the employment situation report released by the BLS has reflected industry losses and gains that amount to an overall drop in the nation’s payroll totals. To be fair, a loss of 20,000 positions in April seems minimal when compared with the 200,000+ jobs that were lost over the first three months of the year. But this also isn’t the kind of streak that economists, employment specialists, or the country’s workers want to see persist as we make our way further into 2008.
The unemployment rate (at 5.0 percent), the employment-population ratio (at 62.7 percent), and the labor force participation rate (at 66.0 percent) all showed little to no movement over the month. Since April of last year, the nation’s overall unemployment rate has jumped from 4.5 to 5.0 percent.
When viewed alongside the numbers from January, February, and March; the industry losses and gains from last month seem eerily familiar. The only difference (and saving grace) from April appears to be a spike in professional and technical services (with a 10,000-job jump in computer systems design and a 9,000-job increase in accounting and bookkeeping services), as well as an ambitious addition of 37,000 positions in the health care industry. The food services sector also helped the cause with a healthy contribution of 18,000 jobs.
The most significant cuts from last month occurred in retail trade, manufacturing, and, where else, but construction. Job losses in retail trade approached 30,000 in April, while manufacturing experienced an even larger drop of close to 50,000 positions. The construction industry trumped all though, with a loss of 61,000 jobs over the past month. The construction sectors have suffered through steep declines within the past year and a half, resulting in more than 400,000 lost positions.
As you can see, respectable gains in the service industries last month were overpowered by unrelenting decreases in a handful of goods-related industries. If the health care and business services sectors continue on with the aggressive growth that they exhibited in April, the American public may once again experience the relief of a BLS report that doesn’t include a negative number in its opening paragraph.
To finish out the report, the BLS found that the average workweek for employees in the U.S. had dropped off by .1 hour, while the average hourly pay for these workers had increased by one cent in April.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
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