A glimmer
Dec 4th 2009 WASHINGTON, DC
From Economist.com
The unemployment rate falls slightly in America
AP
THE American economy has been shedding jobs for nearly two years, but now comes a sign that the gloom could eventually lift. The Bureau of Labour Statistics released new data on payroll employment on Friday December 4th, and across the board the numbers came in better than had been expected.
Some 11,000 jobs were lost in November, the smallest total since the recession began late in 2007. And despite the continued job losses, the overall unemployment rate fell from 10.2% to 10.0%. So, too, did broader measures of unemployment which include marginally attached workers and those who work only part time (for economic reasons). The total number of hours worked ticked up, as did earnings. The statisticians also sharply revised down previously reported job losses for the months of September and October.
The payroll report will leave markets and policymakers happy, for a day at least. Most forecasters had expected that 100,000 jobs, or more, would have been lost, and most thought that the unemployment rate would hold steady or rise. A private employment report for November, which is published just before the official payroll report, showed that nearly 170,000 workers lost their jobs.
None of this means that the troubles are all over, however. The unemployment rate had once before declined in 2009, from June to July, before proceeding to rise for the next three months. A steady decline now will be hard to achieve: one estimate suggests that the American economy needs to add around 150,000 jobs each month just to keep up with population growth.
Employment growth in the economy remains concentrated in just a few sectors. There are encouraging signs in professional and business services; a 52,000 job increase in temporary help services in this category indicates that employers may soon begin creating more permanent positions. (Although by one measure non-manufacturing businesses are losing confidence, according to an index produced by the Institute for Supply Management this week.) Education, health services, and government are the only other sources of employment growth; the manufacturing, construction, and retail sectors continued to cut jobs in November.
That is particularly disappointing given that manufacturing activity has expanded for four consecutive months. More troubling still, the rate of manufacturing expansion declined in November. Increasing activity to date had largely been because of the replenishment of depleted inventories. If this brief spurt of expansion has exhausted itself without creating new jobs, then that bodes ill for recovery in other sources of demand, including consumer spending.
And then there are the ugliest statistics of all. Just over 15m Americans are unemployed, an increase of 8m from the start of the recession. Nearly 6m of those are considered long-term unemployed. Almost 40% of jobless workers have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. Bringing most of these workers back into the labour force will require strong economic growth, of the sort that is unlikely to prevail for at least the next year or so.
This unexpectedly sharp decline in lost jobs is a silver lining on an extremely dark cloud. The White House convened a jobs summit this week, but President Barack Obama was forced to acknowledge that "our resources are limited". The government may find itself sitting around inactive, unable to do much about the situation in which it finds itself. Today's good news aside, it's a feeling with which American workers are very familiar.
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
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