April 2009: Job losses were at their lowest point since September and this looks to be the first sign of a recovery in the labor market.

May 8, 2009

To:
MRINetwork Owners
From:
Seamus Kelleher, Director of PR and Internal Communications
Re:
Bureau of Labor Statistics Report (May 2009)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics published its employment numbers for the month of April this morning. We asked Kitchen PR to put together a short summary and analysis of the numbers.
An Analysis of Today's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) ReportThe full report can be seen here: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm.

This morning, the Labor Department released what could be considered a warm rainstorm. In April, the U.S. workforce unemployment rate (chart 1) rose to 8.9 percent - from 8.5 - and lost 539,000 positions (chart 2). While unemployment is at its highest in 25 years, job losses were at their lowest point since September and this looks to be the first sign of a recovery in the labor market. Temporary unemployment has now continued to improve for the last three months, losing 62,000 positions in April as opposed to the 70,000 lost in March and the 72,000 lost in February.

The unemployment rate for professional and managerial occupations dipped from 4.2 percent to 4.0 percent despite an uptick in the participation rate as consumer confidence reversed course in April. Often an unemployment rate will continue to increase even after jobs are being added to a sector because the increase in participation - people who begin actively searching for a job - outpaces increases in hiring.

Specific sub-industries that are adding some positions include architectural and engineering services adding 2,600 jobs in April, and management and technical consulting adding 1,600 positions. Health and education services continued to be the leader, with an increase of 15,000 jobs in April and just over 400,000 since April 2008. On the manufacturing side, while the numbers are still mostly negative, food production added 10,000 positions, communications equipment remained flat with an increase of just 200 jobs as did coal and petroleum products with an increase of 100 jobs.

The largest single job creator in April was the government, which added 72,000 positions, nearly 60,000 of which were related to the start of hiring for the 2010 Census Bureau. Hiring for the Census is expected to exceed 1 million positions in total over the next year. Without the government positions, private sector employment fell 611,000, but this is still less than the 693,000 private sector job losses in March and showing a general trend of bottoming out.


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This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.