Employment Blog April 2015

By Stephen Singer, April 20, 2015

 

This report is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U S Department of Labor. Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 126,000 in March, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.5 percent. Employment continued to trend up in professional and business services, health care, and retail trade. Job losses continued in mining. Incorporating the revisions for January and February, which reduced nonfarm employment by 69,000, monthly job gains have averaged 197,000 over the past 3 months. In the 12 months prior to March, employment growth averaged 269,000 per month. This information is summarized in Charts 1 and 2 below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Employment in professional and business services continued to trend up in March (+40,000). Job growth in the first quarter of 2015 averaged 34,000 per month in this industry, below theaverage monthly gain of 59,000 in 2014. Within the industry, most of the jobs gained in the past 3 months were in the professional and technical services component, which had added jobs throughout 2014. By contrast, employment in the administrative and waste services component (which includes temporary help services) has changed little thus far in 2015,although this component had added an average of 29,000 jobs per month in 2014.

Employment in health care increased by 22,000 over the month, with job gains in ambulatory care services and in hospitals. Employment declined by 6,000 in nursing care facilities in March. Over the past 12 months, health care has added 363,000 jobs.

Retail trade employment continued to trend up in March (+26,000), in line with the average monthly gain over the prior 12 months. Within retail trade, general merchandise stores  added 11,000 jobs in March. Employment in food services and drinking places changed little in March (+9,000), following a large gain in February (+66,000). Job growth in the first quarter of 2015 averaged 33,000 per month in this industry, the same as the average monthly gain in 2014.

Construction employment was essentially unchanged in March (-1,000). Employment in the industry had grown by an average of 26,000 per month over the prior 12 months.

Employment in mining fell by 11,000 in March, bringing job losses for the first quarter of 2015 to a total of 30,000. In 2014, mining had added 41,000 jobs. The declines in the first quarter, as well as the gains in 2014, were concentrated in support activities for mining, which includes support for oil and gas extraction.

Average hourly earnings of all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 7 cents in March to $24.86. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have risen by 2.1 percent. From February 2014 to February 2015, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) declined by 0.1 percent.

Turning now to our survey of households, the unemployment rate held at 5.5 percent in March, and the number of unemployed persons, at 8.6 million, changed little. Both measures are down from a year earlier, by 1.1 percentage points and 1.8 million, respectively.

Employee tenure in employment is detailed in a Bureau report. Table 1 details the tenure in median years with a current employer broken down by the age bracket of the employees. The table shows remarkable stability in the median number of years employees have worked for their current employer across age brackets and over time since the 2008/2009 recession.