U.S. employers add 916K jobs during March
Jobless rate declines from 6.2% to 6%
WASHINGTON — America’s employers unleashed a burst of hiring in March, adding 916,000 jobs in a sign that a sustained recovery from the pandemic recession is taking hold as vaccinations accelerate, stimulus checks flow through the economy and businesses increasingly reopen.
The March increase — the most since August — was nearly double February’s gain of 468,000, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate declined from 6.2% to 6%.
Even with last month’s increase, the economy remains more than 8 million jobs short of the number it had before the pandemic erupted a little over a year ago. But with the recovery widely expected to strengthen, many forecasters predict enough hiring in the coming months to recover nearly all those lost jobs by year’s end.
The increasingly bright outlook for the labor market follows a year of epic job losses, waves of coronavirus infections and small business closures. Numerous signs suggest that the economy is improving. Consumer confidence in March reached its highest level since the pandemic intensified.
Last month, hiring strengthened across the economy. Restaurants, hotels and bars — the sector that was most damaged by the virus — added 216,000 jobs. Construction companies, aided by better weather after severe storms in February, gained 110,000.
Manufacturers added 53,000. And professional and business services, which include such well-paying fields as engineering and architecture, gained 66,000.
Gus Faucher, chief economist at Pittsburgh-basedPNC Financial Services Group, expects strong job growth nationwide through the rest of this year and into 2022, buoyed by
federal stimulus checks and thevaccine rollout.
“Consumer spending growth will be very strong,” he said. “Job growth will be especially strong in services industries, including leisure/hospitality services. The housing market is booming thanks to extremely low mortgage rates and strong demand for single-family homes, and business investment is picking up as the overall economy soars.”
Mr. Faucher predicts the country will add an average of 600,000 jobs per month through 2021, pushing the unemployment rate down to about 5% at yearend and to around 4% by the end of 2022.
The labor market in the Pittsburgh region is expected to recover more slowly than the nation, he said, primarily because the tourism and hospitality industry, which has been a major source of job gains nationwide, isn’t as big here.
“Job growth [locally] will still be very good, but it will take the economy here a little longer to recover,” he said.
He’s projecting the unemployment rate locally will fall to about 5.5% by yearend. According to the latest figures, the jobless rate in the seven-county Pittsburgh region was 7.6% in January.
One major employer locally, O’Hara-based Giant Eagle, said a hiring event it held in mid-March was well attended. But a number of positions at the supermarket chain still need to be filled, reflecting the improving job market, spokeswoman Jannah Jablonowski said.
“Even though we had a lot of interest ... people still have a lot of options” for jobs, she said.
Nationwide, about 500,000 women returned to the workforce last month and found jobs, in part a reflection of school reopenings around the country. Women disproportionately quit jobs or stopped looking for work during the pandemic, in many cases because they had to care for children attending school online from home. A reversal of that trend will be important as employers seek to rapidly rehire.
A survey found that manufacturing grew in March at its fastest pace since 1983. And vaccinations are increasingly being administered, although new confirmed infections have risen from lower levelsin recent weeks.
The $1,400 checks in PresidentJoe Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief plan have sharplyincreased consumer spending, according to Bank of America’s tracking of its debit and credit cards. Spendingjumped 23% in the third week of March compared with pre-pandemic levels,the bank said.
Spending had begun to rise in March even before the stimulus checks arrived as viral case counts have tumbled from their heights in January. Americans are increasingly willing to venture out from home to travel andeat out, though not yet at their pre-pandemic pace. Roughly 1.5 million people traveled through airports on March 28, according to the Transportation Services Administration. That was roughly eight times the figure of a year ago, although it was still down sharply from 2.5 million on the same day in2019.
The transportation analytics firm Inrix has calculated that daily car trips returned to pre-pandemic levels late last month. Many of those trips have likely been to restaurants, where the volume of seated diners was just 25% below pre-pandemic levels, on average, in the last week of March, according to OpenTable, a restaurant software provider. That’s up from 50% below prepandemic traffic just six weeks earlier.
The burgeoning economic activity is showing signs of translating into more jobs.
Karen Fichuk, CEO of Randstad North America, a recruiting firm, said the company is seeking to fill 38% more permanent jobs than it was at the end of last year. Demand for workers is particularly strong in manufacturing, information technology, logistics, and health care.
Job listings on the website Indeed.com jumped in the last week of March, with available jobs now 13.5% above pre-pandemic levels. Jed Kolko, Indeed’s chief economist, said that job postings in higher-paid sectors, such as financial services and technology, have accelerated in the past couple of months.
The surge of hiring last month raises an important question: Can it continue at the same pace?
Besides the 8.4 million fewer jobs that now exist in the U.S. economy than just before the virus struck, an additional 2 million or so jobs would have been added in the past year under normal circumstances. That meansthe U.S. economy still needs roughly 11.5 million more jobs to regain somethingclose to full health.