US Jobs Machine Chugs Along

Despite widespread worries over President Donald Trump’s import tariffs and growing federal government layoffs, the American economy continued to churn out jobs in April, with total nonfarm payroll employment increasing by 177,000 in April and the unemployment rate remaining unchanged at 4.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.

Employment held steady in the wholesale and retail trades, while health care, transportation/warehousing, financial activities and social assistance experienced gains. As expected in the face of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to shrink the federal government, employment in that sector declined.

The bureau said the overall employment gain in April was roughly in line with the average monthly gain of 152,000 over the prior 12 months. Nonetheless, the ongoing pace of job-creation was deemed worthy of note many analysts. Examples:

• “The ‘R’ word that the labor market is demonstrating in this report is resilience, certainly not recession,” Olu Sonola, head of U.S. economic research for Fitch Ratings, told USA Today.
• “No signs of tariff stress in the labor market yet—strong hiring and stable wages,” Jamie Cox, managing partner for Harris Financial Group, wrote in emailed comments to Forbes.
• “We can push recession concerns to another month. Job numbers remain very strong, suggesting there was an impressive degree of resilience in the economy in play before the tariff shock,” Seema Shah, Chief Global Strategist at Principal Asset Management told CNBC. “The economy will weaken in the coming months but, with this underlying momentum, the U.S. has a decent chance of averting recession if it can step back from the tariff brink in time.”

The labor department notes that April’s initial numbers should not be taken as the final word on the employment figures for the month, and offered the following revised stats for the two months before that:  Total nonfarm payroll employment for February was updated to show 15,000 more job losses, to a total of 102,000 jobs added, while March’s total was revised down by 43,000, to a gain of 185,000.

Those revisions result from additional reports received from businesses and government agencies since the last published estimates and from the recalculation of seasonal factors, the bureau notes.

Click here for the specific numbers of jobs added or subtracted in the various sectors in April.