The economy added 236,000 jobs in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, a slight slowdown from the strong gains of recent months that indicates the labor market might be slowing in response to the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes but remains robust.
The unemployment rate edged down a tenth of a percentage point to 3.5%, a very low figure historically.
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March’s slowdown in job creation and wage growth could cause the central bank to gauge that the labor market no longer threatens to drive up inflation and could sway it toward a more dovish monetary stance.
“The March employment report shows some steam is coming out of the job market, but it isn’t falling out of bed,” Mark Hamrick, Bankrate’s senior economic analyst, said. “Growth in payrolls was largely as expected, and substantially below the pace of the previous two months.”
The Fed is hoping to bring down inflation without tipping the country into a recession — thought to be a difficult task. But Friday’s report is a sign of hope to the extent that it shows that employment growth is at a sustainable pace without unemployment rising.
In fact, unemployment is near the lowest levels since the 1960s. Unemployment for black workers fell to 5%, the lowest rate on record.
And the overall employment rate for workers in their prime working years, defined as ages 25 to 54, rose to 80.7% of the population — the highest such rate since 2001, meaning that the losses of the pandemic have more than been recovered in that group.
The reading follows several months of strong and overperforming job gains, which has been key positive economic data that President Joe Biden has touted even as historic inflation cuts deeply into the paychecks of people across the country. Recent jobs reports have proven surprisingly resilient, with the unemployment rate even declining to the lowest level since 1969 in January.
But this latest report cuts into that narrative and raises fears that a recession is right around the corner.
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Adding to the indicators of a weaker jobs market, the number of new applications for unemployment benefits was at 228,000 last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, much higher than recently reported numbers. The weekly jobless claims reports give an even more up-to-date sense of the labor market than the monthly employment reports.
Additionally, there were about 9.9 million job openings across all sectors in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey updated Tuesday, the first time in nearly two years the number of openings fell below 10 million.
