We are not seeing a lot in this employment report to warrant any large changes in beliefs about the current stance of the labor market. The headline number in the Establishment Survey showed a gain of 311,000, solid, but not remarkable. There were gains in: (1) leisure and hospitality (105,000), (2) retail trade (50,000), (3) government (46,000, of which 37,000 is local government) and (4) health care (44,000). It also mentions losses in: (1) information (25,000), and (2) transportation and warehousing (22,000). It also notes that the information sector has shed 54,000 jobs since November of 2022. There were 25,000 jobs lost in the information sector in February, 9,000 of which were in the Motion Picture and Sound Recording Industry, and 3,000 were in Telecommunications.
Throwing a little cold water on the report were sizable downward revisions to the Establishment Survey employment gains for December (down 21,000 to 239,000) and January (down 13,000 to 504,000). The figure below gives a historical perspective on the first (initial) release, the second (revised) release, and the third (final) release.
In addition to the downward revisions, average weekly hours (private non-farm payroll) are down 0.1 hours, to 34.5. However, average weekly hours are still “high” by (recent) historical standards. Having said that, the combination of the rise in employment with the decline in average hours led to an overall decline in total hours of work by about 4 million, or 1%.
Average hourly earnings were up $0.08 and up about 4.6% year over year. However, CPI inflation continues to erode real average earnings.
The Household Survey showed that the number of people unemployed (up 242,000) and the unemployment rate (from 3.43% to 3.57%) rose. The labor force expanded by 419,000, moving the labor force participation rate to 62.5%. All groups except for teens have been trending up slightly since the end of the pandemic.
Overall, the labor market remains one of the strongest in recent memory. Not only is employment growing at a solid pace, the number of job vacancies has stayed substantially higher than the number of people unemployed and is unprecedented since these data began at the end of 2000. The relationship between vacancies and unemployment, known as the Beveridge Curve, has had a strange journey due to the pandemic. During the Great Recession the unemployment rate increased substantially as vacancies continued to decline. The “counterclockwise” pattern, standard in the search and matching framework, saw a reduction in the unemployment rate as vacancies began to increase. The unprecedented closures to business at the onset of the pandemic drove the unemployment rate to 15% even though vacancies did not decline substantially. Today, vacancies are near an all time high and unemployment near an all time low.
