Its been years since I last did an analysis of the jobs report. I initially did them before the 2008 Financial Crisis and several years after. 2009 was an interesting year to watch the numbers. I was lucky. I had a job.
For the last 10 years the jobs report has shown steady improvements.
Now is a new time. The numbers for March 2020 were a mix, mostly bad. The COVID-19 virus had just started to influence American businesses when the survey was taken. I anticipate April 2020 will parallel some of the worst months of 2009.
Here are the job market and compensation numbers for March 2020 (based on the job report):
Net loss of 701,000 jobs in the month
- Analysts expected an overall drop of 84,000
- Private sector payrolls decreased by 713,000
- Private service producing industries shed 659,000
- Goods producing industries shrank by 54,000
- February was revised to a gain of 275,000 from an original reading of 273,000
- January was revised to a gain of 214,000 from a reading of a 273,000 gain
- Payroll processor ADP reported an employment loss of 27,000 jobs
- 1.2 million people have been jobless for more than 6 months (long term unemployed) – it was 6.1 million in March of 2011
- Employers announced plans to cut 222, 280 jobs in March. It was the most since January of 2009
Unemployment rate rose to 4.4%
- The labor participation rate is 62.7% – a decrease of 0.7% in the month
- The employment to population ratio is 60.0% – a drop of 1.1%
- The U-6 report, which is a broader group to count (workers who are part time but want to be full time and discouraged worker), increased to 8.7% from 7.0% last month
- PMI, a measure of manufacturing pace, is 46.6%. Anything above 50% means the machines are running
- Service sector activity dropped to 52.5%, down from 57.3% last month. Holding relatively positive. A reading in the low 40s was expected
Specific Segment Job numbers:
- Manufacturing down 18,000 jobs
- Construction lost 29,000 jobs – averaged an increase of 17,583 jobs a month over the last year
- Retailers lost 46,000 jobs
- Leisure and Hospitality Services lost 459,000 jobs – this wiped out two years of gains
- Government sector rose 18,000, 17,000 hired for census work
- Education and Health Services dropped by 76,000 jobs
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- Health Care and Social Assistance lost 61,200
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- Professional and Business Services down by 52,000
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- 49,500 jobs lost in Temporary Help
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Wage (can be revised):
- The average weekly paycheck (seasonally adjusted) is $978.80
- The average hourly earnings (seasonally adjusted) is $28.62 – an increase of 11 cents from last month (it was $19.30 in March of 2011)
- Average weekly hours and overtime of production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted is 33.4 hours
Working Thoughts 