More bad news for the GOP, the economy is not going their way.
No question, the U.S. economy and the jobs market remain weak, but what people are focusing on is the direction, which is positive. Friday’s report confirmed the trend, showing an increase of 227,000 jobs in February and an upwardly revised 284,000 in January. That capped the strongest half-year since 2006, when Lehman Brothers, AIG (AIG), and NINJA loans were problems of the future, not the past.
True, the unemployment rate was unchanged at 8.3 percent. But that’s partly because of an inflow of half a million people who were emboldened to enter the labor market as word got around that there were jobs to be had. Not all of them were immediately successful.
Even the all-important employment-to-population ratio ticked up a bit. That’s the share of adult Americans with jobs. It plummeted when recession struck at the end of 2007 and has bobbed around its cyclical lows since the beginning of 2010. It went up a tick to 58.6 percent in February—still a far cry from nearly 65 percent back in 2000.
Not to say all is well. The average workweek did not lengthen, staying at 34.5 hours. Employers typically give more hours to their current workers before they bring on new hires, notes Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. When the recession hit, they cut workers’ hours. The average hourly workweek fell to as low as 33.8 hours in March 2009. It’s been climbing back, but it needs to go higher before employers will turn aggressively to bringing on new workers.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-09/jobs-report-evidence-of-a-recovery-keeps-piling-up