Businesses add jobs but unemployment rate unchanged in September
Friday, October 07, 2011
Businesses add jobs, but unemployment rate unchanged in
September
By: Don Lee, Los Angeles Times
Hiring picked up moderately in September as employers added
103,000 jobs, the government said Friday, easing fears among
economists that the nation was hurtling toward another
recession.
But the job growth wasn't strong enough to lower the unemployment
rate, which remained stuck at 9.1% for the third straight month.
Analysts say about 125,000 net new jobs are needed every month to
keep pace with the population growth and maintain the current
jobless rate.
While construction employment rebounded and retailers hired more
workers last month, manufacturing payrolls shrank again and
government continued its sharp cutbacks.
Also, the number of part-time workers who want full-time hours rose
sharply over the month, to 9.3 million, from 8.8 million in August.
Including these workers and others who have quit looking because
they don't see hope of getting hired, the share of unemployed and
underemployed among the U.S. workforce rose to 16.5% in September,
up from 16.2% in the prior month and 15.8% in May.
The upturn in this category "is discouraging, it's very
discouraging," said Harry Holzer, a labor economist at the Urban
Institute and Georgetown University. "It shows the broader measure
of underutilization" of America's productive capabilities, he said,
and "reminds us that the labor market hasn't recovered as much as
we thought."
Still, the latest jobs report was taken as positive by economists,
because the statistics beat their low expectations for employment
growth. Many forecasters were expecting about 60,000 net new jobs
last month.
"The economy still has some pulse left," said Sung Won Sohn, an
economist at Cal State Channel Islands in Camarillo. "Today's
payroll report shows that the economy probably has avoided a
double-dip recession."
The report said private-sector workers last month, as a whole,
regained the 0.1 hours in the average work week that they lost in
August. The average work week, at 34.3 hours in September, is
considered a leading indicator of demand for labor.
In addition to revising up the August job numbers, government
statisticians said employers in July created 127,000 new positions
instead of the 85,000 previously estimated.
Taken together, that puts the third quarter's average monthly tally
at 96,000 jobs, roughly the same as in the second quarter. In the
first three months of this year, job growth averaged 166,000 a
month.
"There's just been an undeniable decline," said Heidi Shierholz, a
labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. She
calculated that the economy would need to generate 280,000 jobs
every month for five straight years to return to the 5% jobless
rate that was in force before the recession hit in late 2007.
Shierholz and others expressed particular concern about the
continued erosion of government jobs, notably at public schools. In
September, local education jobs fell by another 24,400, accounting
for most of the 34,000 positions lost in government overall. The
Postal Service slashed 5,300 jobs last month.
Over the last three years, state and local government employment
has fallen by 641,000 - of which 43%, or 278,000, have been borne
by teachers and other workers at schools. With public school
enrollment increasing by 0.6% during that period, Shierholz
estimated that the jobs gap in local public education now stands at
about 326,000.
"This decline means not only larger class sizes, but also fewer
teacher aides, fewer extra-curricular activities and a narrower
curriculum for our children," she said.
The loss of public-sector jobs helps explains why the unemployment
rate for women has been inching higher; it rose to 8.1% last month
from 8% in August for women 20 years and older. The comparative
jobless rate for men edged down to 8.8% from 8.9%.
Women gained only 4,000 of the 103,000 total jobs added in
September, according to the National Women's Law Center.
The count of September jobs, over all, was partially inflated by
the return to work of about 45,000 striking Verizon workers, just
as their temporary absence from payrolls lowered the August job
numbers.
Apart from that, professional and business services led the
industries in job growth by adding 48,000 to their payrolls last
month. The temporary-help field, considered a harbinger of broader
hiring by companies, rose by about 20,000 last month for the second
straight month after weakening earlier in the year.
Healthcare employment increased by 44,000 in September, and the
long-declining construction sector added an unexpectedly large
26,000 jobs over the month, almost entirely due to nonresidential
building activity.
The ranks of the unemployed in the U.S. remained at about 14
million. But the share of those who have been without jobs for six
months or more, the so-called long-term unemployed, rose to 6.2
million from 6 million in August.