April jobs report shows stable but sluggish growth
The U.S. labor market added 115,00 jobs in April, while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The number of unemployed people changed little at 7.4 million.
The slightly better-than-expected monthly jobs report shows that the labor market is growing, although at modest pace after months of uneven hiring.
A ‘mixed bag’ report
“This is a good, not great report,” Guy Berger, senior advisor at Access/Macro, told Straight Arrow. “We’ll see how that strength survives later in the year as higher energy prices start to bite.”
Samuel Tombs, Chief US Economist at Pantheon Maroeconomics, echoed that reaction, telling Straight Arrow that Friday’s report is a “mixed bag.”
Tombs said while the labor market appears to be regaining strength, it is “too soon to sound the all-clear” given the continued weakness of hiring intentions and pressures from the surge in energy prices.
The U.S. economy gained jobs in health care, transportation and warehousing and retail trade. Meanwhile, the federal government employment continued to decline.
While the labor market appears somewhat stable despite the continued disruptions from the Iran war and energy shocks, one troubling sign is that the number of workers employed part-time for economic reasons increased by 445,000 to 4.9 million in April.
Job openings and hires suggest a stable but uneven labor market
Separately, the Labor Department on Tuesday released its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS, which showed that U.S. job openings were little changed at 6.9 million in March.
The ratio of job openings to unemployed job seekers increased to 0.95 in March from 0.91 in February, suggesting that the labor market remains relatively stable.
The report also found that hiring picked up significantly in March, while layoffs also rose.
“While the headline numbers were largely steady, underlying data show the market’s broad resilience is far from uniform,” wrote Sneha Puri, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab.
Layoffs rose in the information sector, which includes many tech jobs, as well as in professional and business services. Companies like Pinterest and Dow have tied recent job cuts, in part, to artificial intelligence or automation, while others, such as Amazon and Meta, have signaled that AI is likely to reshape their workforces going forward.
Puri said this week’s JOLTS data line up with findings from the Indeed Job Postings Index, which also tracks job openings but closer to real time. That index found that tech-adjacent sectors had some of the largest job posting declines relative to pre-pandemic levels. For example, she said, IT infrastructure, operations, and support had around 30% fewer roles than before the pandemic.
Meanwhile, job openings in manufacturing and retail rose from a year earlier, and layoffs in health services, construction, government, and financial activities were steadier or lower than in the sectors facing the sharpest increases.
“Put simply, a software engineer, a construction worker, and a retail trader looking at the same headline job opening numbers or hires rate are experiencing fundamentally different realities as job seekers,” Puri wrote.
“Stability, in this market, is less a general condition and more a matter of where you are standing.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
