CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The March Jobs Report and Time

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Let me be straight: the March jobs report was much better than I had expected. I always give my wife my predictions just before the report comes out, because that’s when I have all the data I’m going to have. My pre-release numbers were 40k jobs and 4.5% unemployment. The actual numbers were 178k jobs and 4.3% unemployment. That’s a big miss.

Okay, so what did I get wrong? Starting with the unemployment rate, fans of the household survey know that the monthly data are erratic. A slide of 0.1 percentage point could just be sampling error. In fairness, carrying it to the next decimal, the drop from February to March was almost 0.2 percentage points. That’s not huge, but large enough to be real.

The other data in the survey also was mostly positive, there was a drop of 0.6 percentage points in the unemployment rate for Black workers to 7.1% and 1.0 percentage points in the unemployment rate for young workers, between the ages of 20-24, to 6.4%. I and others had pointed to the sharp rise in unemployment in 2025 for these disadvantaged groups as an early warning sign for a deterioration in the labor market.

This turnaround, which together with improvements in the prior three months, largely reversed the 2025 rise. That is unambiguously good news.

There was also a rise in the share of unemployment due to quits from 11.4% to 12.4%. That’s still low for an economy with 4.3% unemployment, but this measure of workers’ confidence in their employment prospects was looking healthier in March than through most of the last two years.

I could go through more items, but most of the data in the household survey tell a decent story of the labor market. It’s not great, we were down at 3.4% unemployment two years ago, with an unemployment rate for Black workers of 4.8%, but the March household survey does not........

© CounterPunch